The “new never normal” requires smart NextGen supply network solutions

From the January-February 2021 edition of Supply Chain Management Review.

January-February 2021

This morning, I turned on the television and watched the first stretch-wrapped pallets of the just-authorized vaccine being loaded onto a truck at a Pfizer plant in Michigan. From there, the pallets were headed to…

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Emerging from the pandemic’s global disruption are some serious outcomes and lessons.

They are as follows:

• awareness of supply chain management’s value and contributions increased to the point of being a household word;
• supply chain management is clearly a C-Level strategic competitive lever;
• problem-solving intended actions in an ecosystem can produce unintended consequences that exceed the consequences of the initial problem; and
• retire “chain” thinking and accept the fact that we operate in a supply network operating in a network of networks engaged in “ecosystem commerce.”

Given the lessons learned, businesses are facing new and more complex challenges that have dramatically changed customer buying patterns and accelerated new technology and overall management transformation required for all sales channels (mobile, Web, brick-and-mortar) and product flows (inventory deployment, staple stock, cross dock, direct store and last-mile delivery and BOPIS or buy online/pick-up in store).

For most organizations, supply chain practices organizations are forever changing to supply network practices as customers now demand access to more shopping channels and formats than ever and naturally want efficient, seamless and safe shopping experiences with high fill product fill rates.

Businesses must quickly reimagine their baseline requirements, which includes reevaluating the complex trade-offs between cost and customer responsiveness. Businesses must now better prepare for an unfamiliar future and shift their focus to identifying ways to better manage and balance business cost, performance and service during a very transformative period. Future market requirements are highly unlikely to ever return to “normal,” necessitating that leadership look at 2021 as a new beginning to drive transformation to digital supply network processes and practices aimed at enterprise resiliency.

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