The rate and also the impact of disruption is increasing in all ways. It seems this year has been a watershed event from a disruption perspective and the current waves of disruption are continuing with new disruptions created as response to the previous disruptions. This is an important factor in developing a response to disruption; you must continuously evaluate, develop and respond in order to survive. This is not, and cannot be, viewed as a stand alone effort because the disruption is across the market. This requires a collaborative approach from the market as well and this requires strong partnerships across the network. You cannot hope to successfully react and respond to every disruption that comes along and you cannot hope to successfully sense every disruption in time to develop a successful response.
I suggest the solution is to incorporate your collaborative partners in a type of ‘disruption games’ strategic exercise that brings you together to review scenarios and market conditions in a collaborative manner to identify and deliver a strategic response that supports the partners and the market. This is a major factor in the review and update of your supply chain strategy. It seems to me that a key challenge that hinders the success of the strategic response is that when you only view your internal impact and response you do not necessarily see the market level impact of the disruption and then the individual response to the disruption. As we have seen highlighted to the ‘Nth’ degree this year a disruption can create new disruption based on the response, and most importantly, a potential disruption can be eliminated more effectively if the disruption is identified early and the response is collaborative across the market.
This highlights the importance of a strategic collaborative practice that brings your extended supply chain together to share risk and develop cohesive market strategic responses that most effectively respond to the disruption. This builds on the current business continuity practice to discuss and plan for market continuity. As a result of market globalization and the number and type of partners in the supply chain required to support this global market, it is no longer enough to develop a business continuity plan. We must collaborate across our extended supply chain partners to develop a market continuity plan that takes into account the business risks identified by each partner. The outcome of this market continuity plan is a cohesive response plan that improves the ability of the supply chain to sense disruption early and then respond in a cohesive and collaborative market based approach.
This collaborative market approach will reduce the risk of unintended disruption and further impact across the supply chain because the market continuity plan already takes into account the potential impact across the extended partners and then provides the strategy and plan to react to the disruption to limit the impact across the market. I strongly believe there is no other way to succeed in this global market during the extreme disruptions we are experiencing.
Tom Brouillette
Contact: tbrouillette@ncspartners.com
@ncspartners
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Tom Brouillette discusses supply chain trends and provides strategic business & technology advice to his followers and companies.
