Solution Is A Stop In The Strategic Journey

A solution is merely an interim stop or milestone in the journey that is your business strategy. Your strategy is your map that guides your way and methods of taking your journey, just like setting up a destination Google Maps with interim stops along the way. Your strategy must be capable of sensing changes and disruption early to be able to respond and most importantly to evaluate your interim deliverables, or solutions, required to meet your long term strategy. Perhaps most importantly, these adjustments in response to disruption allow you to evaluate your strategy to improve, update, improve and focus over time. The ability of your business and market strategy to sense and respond to disruption must also improve over time in order to survive. This, in essence, is a basic tenant of the continuous improvement process and this continuous process makes up the foundational framework to sense and respond to business, market and environmental disruption.

Supply chain network digitization has become a key factor in supply chain resilience with the need driven in large part by VUCA resulting in waves of disruption across markets. The number of companies seeking approaches to measure and benchmark their digital infrastructure and processes is growing as a result. In order to achieve the improvements necessary to support the demand it is important to incorporate tools that can assess, and perhaps most importantly, monitor the benefits and challenges resulting from the digitization process itself.

This is where real time federated networks and control tower capabilities come into play to provide the capabilities necessary to sense the disruption in time to respond to the issue and even recover in time to limit or even eliminate disruptive results. What we are seeing now is the impact from disruption causing additional waves of disruption that in turn impact the supply chain and dependent businesses. This does not need to be the case and should be a critical focus and objective to the supply chain strategy.

We are seeing now a realization of the continuous impact to the market as a result of the state of extreme VUCA we are experiencing. This is difficult to react and address because, frankly, if feels as if the market is in an almost continuous state of disruption. This requires a collaborative technology that brings together the extended partners across the supply chain on a foundation of a federated network that provides the means to collect and analyze the data generated across the supply chain in forecasting the disruption and then providing suggestions for reactions to the disruption. This is complicated by the volume of data available and necessary to analyze and forecast results and the speed of data generation from each of these data points

Control tower technology combined with machine learning and artificial intelligence combine to help to address the challenge. The technology is in a state now that can quickly and efficiently sense and respond to disruption by utilizing the large volumes of digital data through machine learning and artificial intelligence technologies to analyze and identify the disruption along with potential reactions and responses to the disruption. We have entered into a time now where large volumes of data that is collected and available for analysis can actually be processed in a manner and timeframe that allows the supply chain to respond. This is the power of control towers and this next logical step in the strategic journey to the benefits that can be achieved through a robust digitalization strategy.


Tom Brouillette

Contact: tom.brouillette@gmail.com



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Tom Brouillette discusses supply chain trends and provides strategic business & technology advice to his followers and companies

Manage Disruption Through Process Automation

  

In order to manage disruption it is important to focus, focus is the key to success for all strategic initiatives and programs. The challenge then becomes overcoming the day-to-day priorities and challenges that seem to continually interrupt your focus and energy. It seems to me the challenge is to define a process and incorporate tools that allow you to reduce distractions from interruptions and I see the perfect tool for this challenge to be Robotic Process Automation. Process automation capabilities has reached broad acceptance and usage to support mundane tasks in the operation and customer facing activities. This same capability and utilization can also be extremely important in the leadership suite to help maintain focus is a robust Dynamic Risk Sense and Respond program.

A key responsibility of senior leadership in any organization is the development and execution of business strategy. Business strategy is the single most valued role of leadership and two things are continuously fighting to distract leadership from this responsibility:

Most significant is disruption in the business or the market. This year has provided not just several major disruptions but waves of ‘complimentary’ disruptions adding to the impact that are being driven by events from the impact of COVID-19, to environmental disruptions such as fires and now hurricane season.

Distractions to the day to day operation that in many cases are driven by aftershocks from major disruptions. Distractions can be just as impactful to the development and execution of strategies.

We are in times of VUCA and this requires focus and determination to sense and respond to disruption in a cohesive manner that enhances business strategy rather than disrupting the business strategy. The goal of senior leadership during these times must focus on limiting distractions so that leadership can remain focused on the business strategy rather than day to day operation and continuous reaction to distractions. The challenge now is to define and understand the distractions so that a response can be quickly. This is where RPA can help leadership to identify and understand the distraction so that it can be addressed with a predetermined response.

Senior leadership can be overwhelmed by the waves of day-to-day challenges and tasks and especially during the COVID-19 pandemic the related recovery plans and activities. This focus on day-to-day becomes a drain on focus that quickly slows the strategy activities and plans that effect the long term success and survival of companies. Many of these challenges and tasks may drive change into strategic plans and because of this they cannot be ignored, however RPA provides a means to identify events and disruption that may impact strategy and warrant analysis.

RPA would allow the monitoring of these many day-to-day challenges and interruptions using process and analytics for an early warning system to define and even identify potential responses to the daily challenges and priorities. This would allow leadership to maintain a greater focus on the higher value objectives of your Dynamic Risk Sense and Respond program. 

 Additional benefits to a robust RPA plan include:

1. Utilization of a robust RPA program shows senior leadership commitment and support to a program that adds value at all levels
2. Provides the senior leadership team the opportunity to understand, first hand, the potential of RPA
3. Encourage senior leadership team to evangelize RPA initiatives providing personal experience as examples
4. Expansion of business dashboards that support alerts and views based on current events and defined alert levels
5. Promotes ability to focus on value add objectives and strategy

Focus may be one of the most significant benefits of RPA from a business and market perspective. I am beginning to think that one of the best and most efficient ways to demonstrate value is to increase the focus on automating repetitive tasks and activities performed by senior leadership. We see hundreds of examples and discussions on the benefit of automating repetitive processes and tasks from an operational and customer support perspective and I suggest adding senior leadership tasks and activities to this list.

Senior leadership can be overwhelmed by the waves of day-to-day challenges and tasks and especially during the COVID-19 recovery plans and activities. This focus on day-to-day challenges becomes a drain on focus that quickly slows the strategy activities and plans that effect the long term success and survival of companies, or worse lack of focus and review on current strategies risks implementing an incorrect or ineffective strategy. It seems to me that in order for the process automation trends and especially RPA trends to really push to the tipping point requires a commitment at all levels to the capabilities and the benefits of the RPA capabilities. What better way to display understanding and commitment than to incorporate and expand RPA into the executive suite. This is an important capability that could truly change the focus to allow and encourage more forward view.

A successful RPA strategy must focus on the process and must be viewed as a journey in this example of distraction management. This is because it is difficult to define potential distractions and the response automation in many cases requires refinement in order to truly complete the automation. This continuous refinement process however is one of the RPA 'super powers', RPA allows for quick iterative refinement that supports the necessary enhancements to refine response to the challenge and the distractions.

What does this mean and how can it be delivered? As with all initiatives we must start with the 'what' before we determine the 'how'.

This process automation initiative must start with a clear strategy that defines the first most critical deliverables and then as part of the continuous improvement process that is integral to the success of the process automation initiative the next step is to validate the success of the deliverables and second to confirm and refine the process automation strategy for the next steps. The key to the executive suite adoption is to define the business critical success factors and meaningful alerts that will support the business management at the senior executive level.

It is important to follow this process with the executive suite in order to demonstrate the value and the inherent importance of the process automation movement. It is also important from another perspective - to demonstrate the level of commitment from the executive suite to the organization. It seems to me that in order for the process automation trends and especially RPA trends to really push over the tipping point requires a commitment at all levels to the capabilities and the benefits of the RPA capabilities. What better way to display understanding and commitment than to incorporate and expand RPA into the executive suite.

This is an important capability that could truly change the focus to allow and encourage more forward view.


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.

There Is No Normal

 

I am concerned about what I see as a strong tendency to return to the status quo rather than learn, and plan, for change as a reaction to the disruption cycles, or waves, that we are currently experiencing.  This is a tendency that I see across the US culture to return to normal when there really is no normal and I would say the normal is actually the continuous cycles of change we have experienced through history..  Its not a new normal, there really is no normal!  

In fact, in looking back you can see that businesses and governments and cultures have struggled to recognize this reality as a requirement move forward and be successful.  In fact, the business world cannot afford to ignore the waves of disruption and address the disruption by attempting to return to a perceived normal.  Maybe that is the point - there is no normal and the sooner we accept this reality, the sooner we can actually move forward and create a process that imagines risk to prepare for the disruption.

We must focus not on implementation and execution of a process that enables the business  reaction and response to continuous waves of disruption.  This process must enable moving from a single stream focus to a multi-stream focus and most importantly the process must be practiced until it becomes second nature.  This is developing a new muscle that is critical to the success of business and the market.  It seems that the majority of people and businesses are so set on returning the pre-pandemic 'normal' that they are overlooking reality and the need to develop methods that can sense and respond.  The telling point, or proof, of this observation is the seemingly never-ending series of black swan events that buffet the global market in waves.  If black swan events occur on a regular basis it means they are not by very definition black swan events.  These are rather the 'new normal' that we must first accept and then embrace and incorporate into our world vision.  

This is difficult, human nature does not want to change and that is the continuous and compelling theme for a significant number of people and by extension businesses and the market as a whole.  This is a struggle for many and our challenge is to provide the road map to sense and respond to the waves of disruption.  I think that we are reaching the point of actually creating a new series of disruptions as a result of not accepting the change and attempting to return to the previous comfort level.

This new process requires a robust risk management process that defines a business continuity program.  The goal of the risk management process is to imagine disruption and the potential for description and then determine how to respond to the disruption.  This is where multi-stream definitions and planning comes into play because as we continuously see demonstrated in real life; disruption impact is a reaction to multiple pressures and events combined to force a reaction.  This requires a risk management and business continuity program that is robust enough to first identify the potential and second identify responses to the waves of disruption that are combined based on the waves of disruption.  

A key issue and single greatest factor to the COVID-19 disruption is not the actual physical and structural disruptions but the lack of imagination and forsight to first imagine the potential and second to imagine a response.  We see this over and over - the so-called black swan even that surprises everyone.  As an example, whether you subscribe to climate change you should be developing response to the weather based disruptions we are experiencing.  

Here is the key challenge; you cannot hope to define all possible risks and define reactions for all posible impacts.  This is where the risk management process comes into play, you must define the potential of the risks and then based on the risk define the potential reaction.  Imagination of the possible allows reaction and response to the reality.  

How can you implement a robust risk mitigation program?

Tom Brouillette

Contact: tbrouillette@ncspartners.com

@ncspartners

Thank you for reading my post on Linkedin in addition,  Here at my blog I regularly write about management and technology trends.  To read my future posts on LinkedIn click 'Follow'

Tom Brouillette discusses supply chain trends and provides strategic business & technology advice to his followers and companies.

Benefits From COVID-19 Disruption In The Supply Chain

With each significant disruption in the supply chain and in the global market our supply chain practice and procedures must perform a lessons learned exercise to identify the areas of successful response and areas for improvement. I know it sounds counterintuitive to call out benefits however every event should be evaluated to identify areas of success and improvement. There have been areas of success in the supply chain, especially in the way that the entire supply chain reacted to the disruptions in both product types and manufacturing. There are also many areas for improvement and most importantly this pandemic has identified significant weak areas in the global supply chain. The challenge now is to look back to evaluate the disruptions to determine improvements to incorporate in both sensing and responding to the disruption.

First let me call out that I believe the disruptions in the global supply chain are the result of poor risk analysis and business continuity responses to disruption. The overarching answer is not moving the supply to local manufacturing but to implement improvements in the process and procedures for sense and response to disruption. We know that the impact of a pandemic can and should be defined and practiced, while we can’t tell the exact nature of a pandemic, we can plan for a pandemic response. We also know that the global supply chain has grown and developed as a result of the global market demands on the supply and there is no easy answer to the challenge, especially moving manufacturing locally!

We have learned some key findings from this regarding the importance of the response to the disruption that could reduce the impact in the future. These are the factors that must be documented and a process implemented to review the market conditions on a regular basis. I believe that we have let the supply chain become fragile and brittle as a result of a focus on cost only. One learning or benefit from the experience is the need to plan for disruption of many types and combinations to improve supply chain resiliency. There are two factors that improve the resiliency of the supply chain;

Risk and response analysis is critical to the successful response to any disruption. This is a complex exercise because it requires imagination to identify the potential risk and then another type of imagination to define the response to the disruption. This is a major area of improvement.

Supply chain partner collaboration is another critical success factor to the response to any disruption. We have seen improvements in supply chain partner collaboration recently, however it has not been nearly fast enough, nor far enough. The supply chain is just that a chain of links from partner to partner that must work together to successfully support the market. The supply chain activities have met the challenge of the global market, however, the partners have refrained from extending and growing the collaboration that is necessary to react to significant disruption.

The future success of the global supply chain is based on the ability to quickly sense and respond to disruption, and more importantly multiple combinations of disruption. This is where process automation and analytics come into play. This is also the same areas showing dramatic increases in interest and expanded implementation. We must be careful in our response and strategic planning that we focus on flexibility and resilience when developing our strategic plan and reactions to the multiple disruptions. We have the process in place for the process automation and this has become critical to the response to the disruption. We must now develop the analytics to allow us to sense the disruption before significant impact and define the potential responses to any disruption. The third point that cannot be shorted is expanding collaborative practices across the extended global supply chain to improve response and reaction time to the disruption.

What steps have you taken to evaluate your response to the pandemic and identify areas of improvement?

Tom Brouillette
Contact: tbrouillette@ncspartners.com

@ncspartners

Thank you for reading my post on Linkedin in addition, Here at my blog I regularly write about management and technology trends. To read my future posts on LinkedIn click 'Follow'


Tom Brouillette discusses supply chain trends and provides strategic business & technology advice to his followers and companies.

Strategic Risk Management To Counter VUCA

Hope For The Best And Plan For The Worst should be a consistent and shared mantra for all businesses as a means to focus on strategic risk management. The importance of this has increased to the highest level as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and the activities to both recover and prepare for the next disruption. This requires a significant investment in strategic risk mitigation definition and development and must include partner risk management in the scenario development and risk mitigation strategy. This includes all partners and integrations in the extended supply chain. The weakest link in the supply chain will continuously change depending on the type of disruption and your strategic risk scenarios must be developed to define a response for all scenarios.

One critical activity, or requirement, is implementing a regular risk scenario review process that evaluates the likelihood of scenarios and most importantly, new scenarios. As we have seen from the many disruptions experienced so far this year risk scenarios and potential changes continuously with new risks rising and other risks declining and disappearing. You will never in a million years be able to identify all risks, and the point is that a regular review process provides the means to review so that you can add and remove scenarios as necessary.

The next activity is developing and implementing the appropriate data analytics capabilities that will support the ability to sense the reactions to disruptions and most importantly, the reaction to combinations of disruptions. The risk scenarios must identify the reactions to combinations of disruptions and then you must have a means to measure the responses. This is where data analytics comes into play, along with a healthy helping of imagination. Different disruptions and combinations of disruptions will cause different reactions in the supply chain and these reactions must be identified quickly in order to determine the appropriate response. The risk scenario identification and evaluation is important but it is based on assumptions and personal viewpoints of the team that developed the scenarios. Data analytics brings the facts to the table to help to determine the appropriate response.

The glue that connects these processes and activities is imagination. Risk scenarios require imagination to create, risk response exercises require imagination to develop, data analytics requires imagination to develop the queries and identify the appropriate data and source to identify the reaction to the disruption and then to validate the effectiveness of the response. As you can imagine, this is not a ‘once-and-done’ exercise. This requires continuous review and evaluation in order to grow and evolve with the market and the supply chain. Each disruption and reaction to the disruption creates a new reality stream that changes scenarios and potential for disruption and it is important to continuously evaluate and develop new scenarios.

Data analytics is a very nebulous practice that requires continuous experimentation and evaluation to validate assumptions. The data analytics initially produces the outcome reaction to disruption and combinations. This is only the start, however, because after identification of the outcome you must then try to trace back the results through the responses and combination of responses if you want to tie them back to a particular disruption. I’m not sure that it is critical to tie everything back to a specific disruption though. The point of this whole exercise is to identify a reaction to mitigate the specific business disruption that has occurred and this should be the initial focus. After the mitigation exercise you will need to go back and evaluate the actions that resulted in the disruption on another day.

Tom Brouillette

Contact: tbrouillette@ncspartners.com

@ncspartners

COVID-19 Crashed Into The Economy

Covid-19 crashed into the economy causing supply and demand side disruption that continues to ripple through the supply chain impacting planning and forecasting in addition to transportation, storage and manufacturing disruption. This disruption requires robust data analytics to sense and respond to the dynamic changes that ripple through the economy. The challenge and first priority is developing the capabilities based on a robust data analytics business intelligence model to sense and respond early to risk so that the impact of the continuously changing disruption. This challenge requires a great deal of imagination and focus in order to develop the tools and framework that is both robust and flexible to respond to the disruption.

This is not a single event, it is a significant event in a series of events that will continue to impact the economy and as a result the extended supply chain into the future. This fundamentally changes your business continuity planning requirements to include a larger number of scenarios and combinations of scenarios in order to manage the risk. In addition to the expansion of risk scenarios this also requires more frequent reviews and most importantly - data analytics to sense the disruption early in the life cycle. This combination of additional and improved strategic business risk scenario evaluation and improved analytics to sense the disruption are key to successful response to limit the impact of the disruption.

We have reached the point now in the global market where these capabilities are critical not to the success of your organization but they are now a critical factor in the survival of your organization! The current situation is a perfect example of how risk is driven by multiple events to disrupt. In the last year we have experienced severe climate related events such as wildfires, hurricanes and tornadoes that impact the market and product demands Then add to this the US / China trade war that initiated the manufacturing shift from China to other Asia Pacific countries. Then before the trade war settled the pandemic crashed into the market first impacting manufacturing and flowing through a shut down of the world economy.

All of these factors come together for a 500 year disruption that must be resolved. We must reset our scope and risk management though to plan for the 500 year disruption continuously. In a global market there are so many factors that influence change and disruption along with the impact of the disruption. These factors change with the season and the relationship and impact of the combination of factors require a focused risk scenario strategy in order to sense the factor early so that the response can be identified to limit the disruption.

It is no longer acceptable to react to the disruption after the fact. The disruptions are coming too quickly and more importantly the disruption builds on previous factors and disruption to create new impacts. Your organization will not be able to survive unless you implement a risk management sense and response strategy that is frequently reviewed and revised for new scenarios and responses. The good news is that the tools are available now to support this initiative and only require the focus and priority to develop and monitor the strategy.

COVID-19 Requires Optionized Supply Chain

I have been discussing supply chain disruption for quite a while now as it relates to consumer demands and natural events such as destructive weather. The COVID-19 pandemic now adds a new and even more real, and more serious, disruption that must be addressed. The key underlying challenge is how to address disruption and especially extreme disruption. We have already entered into a time of extreme discontinuous disruption that demands and absolutely requires immediate response to survive and support the demands created from the disruption. We can no longer ignore the disruption cycle and as a result must focus now on an optionized supply chain rather than an optimized supply chain so the response can be supported through pre-planned actions. The critical requirement is to continue the supply chain and minimize disruption through a robust risk sense and respond strategy. This risk management strategy must become a critical aspect to the supply chain management overarching strategic plan.

The global supply chain is a fact of life now and as a result of the length of time this supply chain has been developing, it is now the norm. Frankly, it would require an unreasonable length of time and money to change, and most importantly, the cost would never be recovered. We must look past the angry demands to move manufacturing ‘back to the US’ and instead take a more reasonable approach to accept and plan for disruption and then develop options and practices to quickly and efficiently adjust to disruption. This means adding an enhanced risk analysis and risk management strategy to the supply chain planning and forecasting tool kit. We must now focus on disruption scenario planning and response option development to ensure that we are able to minimize the impact to the supply chain.

The good news is that we already have practices and tools available to enable disruption options risk analysis and determination. The current state of supply chain software with the addition of big data analytics provides the framework for a robust early risk warning capability to allow implementation of options to address the disruption. We must develop the strategy now utilizing the framework of available tools to support the process. The result of this initiative will be a framework of process and procedures that will allow the extended supply chain partners to sense and respond to disruption based on scenarios and options that have been identified previously.

The challenge with implementing the disruption sense and respond risk analysis framework is not the supply chain management tools. These tools are quite robust and provide the capabilities to adjust quickly and efficiently to the disruptions in a truly efficient manner. These tools over the years have progressed to a state of flexibility in configuration capabilities that is truly quite amazing. The flexibility and configurability has been built into the software to allow a super user to support standard and general maintenance requirements without support of an engineer or software developer. These configuration capabilities I believe are quite capable to support the demands of the ‘optionized’ supply chain to support the risk sense and response framework.

The challenge now from a technology perspective is related to sensing and identification of the risk in a timeframe that allows the supply chain to identify and then implement the appropriate configuration options to manage and flourish during and (most importantly) after, the disruption event. Fortunately, big data and analytics has reached a state that is beginning to support the requirements to sense and determine how to respond to the disruption based on a predetermined business continuity plan. The analytics requires an efficient tool in order to bring the data together from disparate sources into a pool where the analytics can be utilized. This is one of the new continuing supply chain management requirements.

This leads to the next challenge which is to define a robust and flexible business continuity plan that provides suggestions for predetermined options based on the type of disruption. This business continuity plan takes on new meaning and also new use in the supply chain. This plan must be extended first to identify any type of business and supply chain disruption that may occur and then identify the potential for the disruption (risk) along with configuration options to react and adjust to the disruption. In my experience, the business continuity plan has been reviewed at a minimum and normally on an annual basis. The review process must be more rigorous and reviewed more frequently in order to provide the flexibility and direction required to address disruption.

I suggest a two-pronged focus on the review of the business continuity plan to extend the types of disruption and the potential impact along with identification and implementation of a data analytics tool that supports efficient and flexible identification of disruption early. It is most important to identify the potential for disruption so that you can react early and adjust to address the disruption prior to serious supply chain impact. The key focus must be the big data analytics in order to sense and respond to the disruption. Disruption is a way of life now, it is critical to manage the disruption in a way that limits the supply chain disruption.

Tom Brouillette

Contact: tbrouillette@ncspartners.com



@ncspartners

Supply Chain Strategy For COVID-19 VUCA

While the COVID-19 pandemic is certainly the most significant disruption that the world is facing, it is by no means the only disruption the world and especially the supply chain is facing.  In fact, the level of VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity) has increased over the last 5 - 8 years through a series of natural disasters, political unrest and most recently of course the pandemic.  What we must learn is not how to address specific disruption events, we must instead develop a strategic plan that identifies potential disruption events that may or may not occur and then identify potential responses that can be selected singly or grouped to respond to the disruption.  

This VUCA response strategy is simply a more robust business continuity plan.  This is dramatically over-simplified, I understand, however what I am focused on is the definition of continuity which has been an established practice for a long time.  This VUCA response strategy requires a more robust process that defines every type of response for every type of disruption that would then be reviewed on a regular basis to validate and update.  This enhanced response strategy must be incorporated as part of the regular continuous improvement process to analyze not only potential process improvement but also potential disruption.  The risk analysis must become part of the regular process for the business and especially the supply chain to allow for a well thought out response that will reduce the impact of the disruption.

I know that many think - how can you evaluate potential risk of a disruption such as a pandemic?  The evaluation is not based on any specific type of risk, it is based on potential impact if and when any service, supplier (especially raw materials or parts suppliers in manufacturing), transportation partner or customer is suddenly shut down.  Another very critical aspect to the risk analysis is the impact sudden changes in package quantity when specific areas of demand are impacted.  For instance, when institutional demand dried up as a result fo COVID-19 and dairy farmers were forced to discard milk.  The risk analysis and continuity planning must focus on the areas of impact and not the impact event in order to be effective and support the needs of your business. 

The continuity analysis and planning must be planned and executed as a continuous process that is reviewed on a quarterly basis and the events that can impact the business must then be reviewed to confirm that the potential impacts are still valid and also review and the response is still valid and most importantly, the triggering events analysis and review process is still valid.  With the increase in business threatening disruptions it is critical to get ahead of the events as much as possible so that the reaction to the event can be triggered in a time frame that will control and limit the impact of the disruption.  The best time to plan for the response to a disruption is before the disruption occurs!

We have entered into a time of VUCA that will continue to impact professional practices and capabilities and then this will carry over into the personal side as well.  Everything is connected and there is a ripple effect across industries that must be anticipated.  It is no longer acceptable to say - who would have expected this type of disruption?  We all must be prepared for disruption of any kind that may occur and then have a response planned and ready to implement.

COVID-19 Disruption Demands Supply Chain Elasticity

The time to react to an extreme disruption such as the COVID-19 pandemic is not when the pandemic is imminent, or in the midst of the pandemic. The time to react is before the pandemic, or the disruption event, to prepare reactions based on the potential. This enables your organization to identify and evaluate potential reactions prior to the event and this dramatically reduces reaction and also ensures appropriate and effective reaction. Reaction to a disruption requires elasticity in the process and the organization in order to bend and stretch rather than break. Reaction to disruption also requires the ability to sense the disruption in time to react.

Recently there is a great deal of bluster focused on the dangers of the global supply chain that suggests the only way to eliminate the risk is to move manufacturing back to the US. This sounds great in a sound bite but is really not feasible and would never move forward. There are a few significant challenges to moving manufacturing back to the US starting with the challenge of an increased cost resulting from

products manufactured in the US. The US has been addicted to the cost savings delivered by global manufacturing and it will be next to impossible to wean off that drug. The other challenge is the people and manufacturing capacity that would be required to meet the consumer demand.

The appropriate solution involves a flexible and nimble global supply chain that incorporates backup and alternative options for both raw materials, manufacturing plants and even transport options to reduce the risk of disruption. The issue is not a global supply chain, the issue is the deficient risk identification and mitigation to react and address disruption. This requires a focus on analysis and reaction to respond and resolve the disruption. The supply chain must be able to react to difficult situations and conditions best described as VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity) that requires the continuous ability to sense and react to disruption as it materializes.

As an industry we have implemented the process and the tools to respond to disruptions to ensure business continuity and now the use of these tools must be extended in order to react to the VUCA earlier in order to limit the business disruption. The challenge for the industry is the early planning and preparation for VUCA events so the reaction can be predetermined and practiced so the disruption can be limited. This requires robust tools and capabilities to sense the disruption earlier to allow time to implement the business continuity procedures.

The business continuity procedures must be predefined and practiced regularly so that they can be executed quickly and efficiently in response when the disruption is identified. This is standard operating procedures for businesses in the supply chain. One of the new factors to this continuing challenge is the types of disruption and the ‘surprise’ of the disruption. I think sensing and responding to VUCA must be the key starting point to business continuity. The definition of business disruption must be expanded to focus on VUCA and the analytics must be improved. The business continuity is not all or nothing and should be viewed as modules that should be engaged depending on the situation.

We must accept the fact that we have entered a time of extreme disruption and must focus on the ability to sense the disruption and quickly implement the response to the disruption. This means the business continuity procedures must be extended to be utilized in response more efficiently to the disruption. The first step though is focus on sensing the disruption! This is where tools and technology will play a key role, including advanced analytics and artificial intelligence and even process automation.