Which technologies will make your supply chain resilient?

This is an excerpt of the original article. It was written for the March-April 2021 edition of Supply Chain Management Review. The full article is available to current subscribers.

March-April 2021

Last night, my wife and I shared a socially distanced bonfire with a few friends. One was a retired physician who is spearheading the vaccination effort in the small New Hampshire city where I live. New Hampshire has had its challenges getting needles into arms like everywhere else, but it seems as if we’re breaking through the log jam. For example, between week 1 and week 3, they’ve tripled the number of people they can vaccinate in a day, and they’ve expanded from five days a week to seven days a week. At least for now, there has not been a shortage of vaccines. I know there is a long way to go, but you can feel it picking up speed. Call me…

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Companies have long followed a basic formula for delivering products on time and at the lowest cost: First, construct a highly detailed supply chain model, based on forecasted conditions and priorities over a three- to five-year span, and then execute against that predefined performance blueprint.

Prolonged trade wars and a devastating pandemic drove home the limitations of this approach, as global disruptions made it difficult (and at times impossible) to execute against plans. Many companies are now embracing the imperative to build a more resilient supply chain that can absorb and rapidly adapt to unexpected shocks and make decisions in the execution window, as well as satisfy increasingly diverse and personalized customer demands.

The essence of such a supply chain is the ability to sense what’s happening in the external environment and across one’s own supply chain, while continuously pivoting in response. The goal is still to reliably deliver products on time, to the customer’s complete satisfaction, at a highly competitive cost. But the approach is fundamentally different: it melds planning and execution into a simultaneous process. This is the only logical response to an operating environment that increasingly defies prediction.

Technology is clearly crucial to moving in this new direction. The open questions are: “What will it take to get there?” and “where do we start?”

Resilience stress test

To help C-suites shape actionable answers to these questions, Kearney created a resilience stress test (RST) that blends immediate and long-term perspectives to pinpoint your supply chain’s vulnerabilities and surface your most compelling strategic opportunities.

This comprehensive scan assesses supply chain resilience across eight dimensions spanning a company’s own processes, as well as those of suppliers and partners, all from the perspective of preparing to reliably and cost-competitively deliver superior customer value—even in the midst of disruption. Within that broader assessment, the RST closely examines which existing and emerging technologies are most vital to increasing your company’s resilience. Specifically, we explore which technologies could most effectively enhance your ability to do the following.

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