Sustainable Supply Network

I believe ‘supply chain’ is no longer an appropriate description because the combination of market demands and disruptions have fundamentally changed the supply requirements and now demands networked capabilities to meet the normal course of business. The pandemic has highlighted this new reality in a dramatic way through the waves of disruption that have been crashing on the supply chain. These disruptions have been systematically breaking the links in the supply chain and as a result demonstrated the importance of a ‘Supply Network’ in order to sustain the supply. It is too easy to call out the initial disruption of the pandemic as a black swan, a once in a lifetime, event and we would be foolish to think this will be resolved into a ‘new normal’. The new normal will more likely than not be made up of waves of disruption that demand a new sustainable supply network to provide the framework and foundation required to support the market going forward.

The disruptions we experience regularly and with increasing frequency have highlighted the need for a resilient and sustainable supply network that can flex and connect based on the current availability and capability in real time. This has quickly become a base requirement that a significant challenge to the technology and the culture of organizations and especially the marketplace. The disruption and the resulting changed demands on the supply network require agility and resilience to respond along with the tools and methods to swiftly sense the disruption and then just as swiftly determine the appropriate reaction, or series of potential reactions, to the disruption so the network can swiftly and efficiently execute the most appropriate reaction(s). There is no longer an option to perform deep analysis and study the disruption, the market now demands immediate reaction in order to implement a repair to the network from the disruption.

This is where it gets difficult, how does your network first sense the issue and then quickly and efficiently react? The simple answer is that without a real time networked solution that incorporates artificial intelligence tools to sense the issue and then machine learning to analyze the options there is really no way for a human to react is the necessary timeframe. The key to success in this global market is a resilient and sustainable supply network that can work collaboratively across nodes and partner to react and repair the issues. The challenge is overcoming the limitations of the legacy batch processes and practices.

This is something that requires a concerted and coordinated action plan across the global supply network in order to support the market demands. The answer is definitely not bringing manufacturing back to the local market because the global supply cannot support the demand effectively or efficiently. Unfortunately, there are really no ‘easy’ answers to the challenge and on top of this, the response requires a continuous analysis is real time in order to sense and respond in a manner that addresses the issue or the disruption. Disruption in the global market is never the same reason and always requires a combination of multiple responses from multiple supply partners. This is difficult and requires a network response in real time to support the market.

Our goal should not and cannot be to build a new normal, our goal instead must be building a resilient and sustainable network of partners that collaborates to support the changing demands. This is a difficult goal that will not get easier with time. Our current supply chain tools are not architected to support a network and this must be the first step in the journey. This will be a complicated challenge that requires a significant level of collaboration to achieve. Delay will only make the transition more difficult though.

Conversational Commerce

Conversational Commerce

The retail omni market, along with the entire retail supply chain collaborative network, is being driven by consumer demand towards a significant disruption that will transform the legacy consumer focus into a social commerce, or conversational commerce, marketplace. I think the conversational commerce name is highly descriptive of the transformation and provides a highly descriptive name to the next transformation wave. The next transformation wave will be focused on the two-way interaction between customer and retailer or customer and service provided or retailer and service provider, I’m sure you get the drift, creating an eComerce network market. The next transformation will eliminate the hierarchy across the retail marketplace and replace the hierarchy with a network of direct connections to the appropriate partner at the appropriate time in the retail transaction. The benefits of this model are dramatic for all parties involved and provide the framework for interaction through the next transformation wave.

Conversational commerce is the next logical step in the transformation of the social commerce marketplace network and provides a great way to frame the transformation. The focus of conversational commerce is a network of two-way interaction between consumers and partners to support shopping and purchasing in the omni market. This is a further clarification and more importantly an enhancement to shopping and purchasing in the marketplace. This creates a virtual shopping capability that incorporates virtually the interaction that normally occurs in the physical retail shopping trip. It provides the ability to interact across all of the parties involved in the shopping experience to provide the value-added services and products during the shopping experience that would be difficult in the current standard eCommerce or omni market shopping experience. The two-way interaction is a very powerful tool that will improve the shopping experience and increase the opportunities for additional sales and add-on services.

The transformation definitely requires a means to coordinate and direct the communications across the involved parties and this is where the control tower concept and technology comes into play. A control tower framework is required to provide a plug-and-play framework for communication and collaboration with external partners and even consumers that allows the partners to focus on the business benefits rather than the communication requirements. The control tower framework must be embraced and implemented across all of the partners to maintain the communication and realize the benefits. This framework provides the basis for integration from a message perspective to allow the partner to communicate with a partner in the most efficient manner for the partner while maintaining a clean and stable interface with their own internal systems. The framework provides an externally facing tool that is flexible and robust to simplify the addition and integration with other partners, it does not eliminate the work to external partners, it eliminates the work on the internal integration though to the business applications.

Conversational commerce focuses on the two-way communication between partners, including manufacturers, transport, service providers and consumers. This model will transform the omni channel retail marketplace again based on the consumer lifestyles and the consumer embrace of technology to support the social network. Conversational commerce is another term for what I have been calling social commerce which is the two-way direct communications with all players or partners involved in the retail marketplace. Consumers view retail shopping as a social experience which is why malls were so successful and now the consumers are using conversational commerce to create a virtual mall.

Artificial Intelligence Improving Logistics

Over the last few years there has been a great deal of interest and development in the area of artificial intelligence (AI) and the potential to improve the supply chain and logistics.  There is an immense amount of data available across the supply chain from a combination of Internet of Things (IoT) devices connected directly to supply chain partners and the partners across the supply chain network.  In addition to the data produced internally in the organization supply chain actions, there is now an immense amount of data available from external customers to the supply chain network partners via direct interaction within the supply chain network through partner portals and direct interactions  integration points with supply chain external customers.  The Internet and online interactions from eCommerce (B2B and B2C) provide this data.  Supply chain partners would be foolish not to use this data to improve their logistics capabilities.

 

The challenge for the supply chain network has been two fold;

-        How to utilize the data

-        What data to collect for both analysis and use 

 

Artificial intelligence starts with the collection of data for analysis and this is an important starting point.  There is no way early on in the collection of data to determine what will be important.  This is because the analysis must be performed first to understand the potential use and value of the collected data.  The intelligence part of the analysis also requires a great deal of information in order to validate the hypothesis and then to determine direction based on this intelligence.  Starting with the data you can see why it is so important to collect everything because the intelligence part of the equation will generally require additional data from the same periods to confirm and validate direction. 

 

It is important to collect all data then because you cannot tell what may be important for the analysis when determining direction.  The good news here though is that storage is cheap and the technology to analyze vast amounts of data has been improved through game-changing improvements in technology.  These two points have probably done more for the growth and development of artificial intelligence than any other developments over the last few years.  These improvements in technology allow the supply chain to refine and redirect logistics activities and practices based on facts and data rather than hunches and hopes.  Combine these two technologies with the growth of the Internet of Things capabilities and technologies and the potential for improvements is almost overwhelming.

 

These capabilities bring improvements and opportunities in automation including warehouse location and slotting, drones and robotics to improve efficiencies and reduce costs. These are not the only areas of improvement to the achieved through artificial intelligence.  There will be improvements in volumes, inbound and outbound forecasts for instance, that will bring dramatic change to the supply chain as manufacturers and transportation providers revise their processes to incorporate the analytics into their plans and procedures.  The warehouse operation though will also be dramatically impacted as artificial intelligence brings analytics to the equation that allows the operation to understand and immediately adjust labor forecasts to changes in the operation during the date based on near real time events.  Artificial intelligence is just another force bringing transformation to the supply chain and the supply chain must start with a baseline of continuous improvements in the flexibility and continuous change practices in order to meet the transformations.

 

Tom Brouillette

Contact: tom.brouillette.@gmail.com

 

Thank you for reading my post on LinkedIn in addition, Here at my blog I regularly write about

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

Next Wave For Retail

The next wave for the retail marketplace is the convergence of the internal business networks that include the supply chain partners and the external social network that includes consumers and the variety of social network sites and connections. The consumer is driving this convergence through their use of network services and connectivity as they are building their own network of connections for services and goods along with their connections. The objective for this consumer network services convergence is to connect in their own personal network both retailers and their extended supply chain partners such as transportations services and manufacturers to build a cohesive and service based network to support their own needs. This extended consumer network of services and computing capabilities, especially mobile capabilities, have given the consumer the tools to build their own social commerce network. Many service providers have recognized this and have developed new services that allow the consumer to create their own personalized shopping and purchasing capabilities. Considering the growth and value to the consumer of these social commerce network services I really do not see this trend slowing are expect quite the opposite.

There are two things bringing this together;
- The first is the computing and network capabilities,
- The second is new service providers taking advantage of these changes.

A big part of this next wave is how retailers and service providers utilize localized and personalized services in their practices. These services will provide the secret sauce that will fuel the next wave of retail. This has been growing for a while now through experimentation from both consumer experimentation and service providers. You can also see that some retailers have embraced the wave and are working towards developing the market in this direction.

I see the key aspect to the next wave as the localization of services and especially as it relates to interactions with consumers which in turn will drive the personalization that can grow as a result of the localization. Consumers have been using social networks and technologies for a while now to develop their own virtual shopping practices and even virtual shopping malls of their favorite retailers. They are using the services that are available from mobile app developers and now Google has jumped into the localization with both feet to provide consumer capabilities to search and shop based on their current location and even their destination location.

The Google developments and offerings they are providing through Maps alone will drive the localization of eCommerce to new levels. Retailers, restaurants and entertainment are offered and consumers are providing the personalized evaluations, ratings and recommendations on goods and services. Consumers are already tapping into these services in their shopping and travel decisions and retailers must recognize this and then take actions to incorporate the capabilities into their plans, services and offerings. Google is commercializing these services to expand their apps and services further into the lives of consumers and retailers and other service providers have a great reason to embrace these capabilities in their offerings to support their own sales and services.

Fortunately for retailers and service providers Google, for one, is providing the framework for localization that can be utilized by retailers and they are happy to provide this framework for others because it extends the Google brand and the data Google is able to obtain from this framework. This is an important benefit that should also push retailers into this next wave; the amount of customer data available as a result of this localization and personalization can be immensely valuable to retailers.

What are your observations and experience in this social commerce network? Are you seeing any impact or changes to consumer demands that can be related to these changes?

Tom Brouillette

Contact: Tom.brouillette@gmail.com

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Supply Chain Network Resilience

 

Supply Chain Network Resilience

 

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 another variation on a continuous improvement program and requires the same methods and practices to achieve the digitization objectives and benefits.  It is important to review and validate modifications because of the relationships between multiple digitization initiatives and their combined benefits and challenges.  

Kearney’s Resilience Stress Test “Strategic Options To Build Resilience”, assesses supply chain resilience outside of the common disaster scenario capability and capacity planning to be able to rapidly flex, or repurpose, assets, across your extended supply chain network to be able to respond to unanticipated supply shocks, such as trade wars, major weather events, or permanent shifts in demand.  The dimensions of this stress test framework include: geography; planning; suppliers; inbound transportation; manufacturing; outbound distribution; product portfolio and platform; and financial/working capital.

In order to be successful the framework monitoring must be spread widely across all supply network points, and processes, as well as those of suppliers and partners, initially starting with critical processes and partners, with a focus on measuring the degree of digitalization and capabilities in each of these factors. These digitization capabilities and processes include using IoT sensors in logistics or fulfilment operations, robotic process automation in production or distribution, and analytics and machine learning in production centers, inventory management, and financial capital management.  As a starting point, the initial evaluation provides the baseline that should be used to monitor and measure progress and must be developed to support monitoring across your extended supply network.

This is where automated control tower software can and should be utilized to support a process that will continuously monitor the network.  Ideally, this control tower solution would be capable of alerts and even prescribe how to resolve issues as well as actually resolving issues automatically as they occur.  The challenge in the extended supply chain network is caused by the velocity of disruption experienced across your network.  These disruptions can occur with such speed and spread across your network partners that it becomes impossible to perform the necessary analysis and adjustments to react and address the disruption in a timely manner.  It is not enough to identify after the fact because of the potential damage to your business.  The velocity of the disruption and the potential impact requires immediate response and this can be achieved by a robust software solution that spans the supply chain network.

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.

Transition Legacy Framework to Digital Enablement

There has been much talk about ‘getting back to normal’ and ‘new normal’ that I have been thinking quite a bit about because of the continued cycles of lockdowns and now the latest pandemic surge. These disruptions on personal lives are also impacting the business world from a loss of jobs and business closing to the continued work from home requirements. It is past that time now to accept the new reality (I refuse to call it ‘new normal’!), if you haven’t already and take the appropriate steps to live in this new reality. We are already seeing the results of change and we really need to focus now on developing and executing a digital enablement strategy. The pandemic has driven change due to health and safety concerns and these changes themselve are driving the digital transformation. This transformation is beginning to increase in velocity as consumers accept and become accustomed to the new reality and we will never go back.


Any business that directly interacts with the consumer, retail - services, restaurants, for instance, have borne the brunt of the pandemic disruptions to the point of breaking and many have been pushed past that point to failure. Consumers have changed the retail and services markets forever through digital interactions that are redefining the consumer relationship. The changes to the market are not really new, but simply and more accurately, sped up dramatically in a natural progression that has been pushed to the limit by the pandemic. The change here is the ability of consumers to shop, and more importantly, to obtain goods and services without contact, whether eCommerce and delivered to their home or via curb-side pick-up.


Retailers must now take a multi-prong approach to their digital enablement activities; they must focus on a strategy that first defines and then delivers the digital enablement while they also focus on immediate response to the waves of disruption driven in many cases from the COVID-19 transition support requirements. This is difficult for all businesses and especially difficult for the legacy retailer that was already struggling with digital enablement before the pandemic. The change and disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic has pushed digital enablement past the tipping point though and this has now suddenly become a key to survival rather than a progressive transition. Now that this genie is out of the bottle there is no going back. It is now a matter of great urgency to define and implement a digital enablement strategy.


This will be an overwhelming task if the legacy retailers treat this as ‘business as usual’ because there just is no time for them to slow-walk the changes through the organization. If the legacy retailers treat this time of disruption the same as other changes in the market they will be left in the ditch, smouldering. This requires quick actions to move forward without an idea of the end result. At this point we don’t have any idea what the end will look like because the end is being defined and redefined through waves of disruption.


These retailers must implement a strategy of continuous change. They must build a flexible framework that is able to sense and then respond to the disruption. This will require a strategy of digital enablement to be able to sense the disruption and quickly respond. Unfortunately these same legacy retailers are also struggling with labeling applications and cumbersome integration between internal applications and their external partners. The first order of business is to build a flexible framework that will support the velocity of change, while also responding to disruption.


In addition to the above, these legacy retailers do not have the time to figure this out, they must act quickly. Fortunately there are two opportunities for retailers to incorporate in order to survive; consultant organizations to help with the strategy implementation and RPA tools to help bridge the digital enablement between legacy applications and partners. The first step is recognition and the support of senior leadership. This is a huge undertaking and requires a great deal of support from many different areas to succeed and this will require support over time to fail and correct direction. Without full throated support from senior leadership this will only end in failure.


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.

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


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.

Counter Disruption In Supply Chain With Strategic Collaboration

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

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.