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



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

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

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.

Supply Chain Elasticity

There is more and more bluster focused on the dangers of the global supply chain and the only solution is to move manufacturing back to the US. This sounds great in sound bites as an option but is really not feasible and would never move forward to be executed. There are a few significant challenges to moving manufacturing back to the US starting with the fact that no one will pay the increased cost required of 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. There are a number of additional challenges including; materials supply chain and people and manufacturing plant capacity that have both been redesigned based on global manufacturing capacity and cost savings.

This leaves us in a state of risk for high impact disruption from global events such as pandemic that impacts entire regions and reverberates around the world. The issue is not a global supply chain, the issue is deficient risk identification and mitigation to react and address disruptions as they surface and not after the marketplace has been disrupted. The goal is to limit the disruption to limit the impact. This requires a focus on VUCA analysis and reaction to respond and address the disruption.The solution involves a global supply chain that incorporates key process and partner backup and alternative options for the supply chain including, raw materials, plants and even transport options to reduce the risk of disruption.


This is not a simple solution though because of the diverse and continuously changing supply chain! This requires a coordinated collaborative effort that combines people, process and most of all technology in ways that support the sense and response capabilities of partners and processes across the global supply chain. Luckily, we are entering a time where advances in technology, and especially collaborative technology, can be incorporated to support the velocity of change. The waves of disruption unleashed by the pandemic have started an era of extreme VUCA requiring enhanced technology capabilities to respond with the same velocity.


This is where control tower technologies come into the picture as a means to support a coordinated collaborative response to the waves of disruption. Control tower capabilities and opportunities have come into their own, and really stepped up during the pandemic to quickly show value. With AI, machine learning and process automation added to the control tower tool box you can quickly come to the point where you can quickly meet the velocity of disruption to react to changing demands and continuous waves of disruption. You must come to accept the fact that you will never eliminate disruption, the point is to build the capabilities to sense and respond before the disruption gets out of hand.


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 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.