The current pandemic continues to make a profound impact on the global supply chain – particularly across industries including electronics, auto, pharmaceuticals, metals, and industrials.
While the focus today is on maintaining supply and meeting customer needs, organizations must consider how to react to these ‘black swan’ situations – preparing for the next inevitable disruption.
A new report from the IBM Institute for Business Value, “COVID-19 and Shattered Supply Chains” highlights that the pandemic has revealed vulnerabilities in global supply chains, causing unanticipated chaos while emphasizing a need for resilience and smarter systems based in AI, automation and blockchain technologies.
This calls for organizations to:
In this exclusive interview, Jonathan Wright, Global Head Cognitive Process Re-engineering at IBM, shares his views on how companies should use technology to leverage emerging patterns during disruption, helping them prepare for future events.
We’re seeing disruption now as we’ve never seen it before, and organizations across the board are realizing that they’ll need to shift operating models to maintain the longevity of their business.
As businesses transition to the “new normal,” there should be a significant acceleration of digitization to allow supply chains to emerge in a stronger position.
But that has to start now, with businesses using emerging technologies like AI, blockchain, and IoT to quickly identify patterns in supply and demand to seek out opportunities to these dynamic business challenges.
It’s critical that organizations view this as an opportunity to look at demand patterns at a local and global level.
This enables tighter collaboration with logistics partners to better understand how to manage (seems it needs a qualifier on what the “constraints” are; the word “fulfillment” might be what’s missing here so it reads more complete, “…how to manage fulfillment constraints while servicing customers…) constraints while servicing customers with the products they need, where they’re needed most.
This pandemic has highlighted cracks and flaws in the system that need to be filled now to get to the other side.
But many of the processes and solutions implemented now should become permanent to help businesses evolve to emerge stronger and better-positioned to service customers – especially in periods of unpredictable, unavoidable disruption.
They should invest in things like hyper-automation to offload some of the more manual, time-intensive tasks – allowing employees to focus on work that is more purposeful and valuable to them.
With AI tackling data gathering and analysis, workers can focus on tasks that are more professionally rewarding while also thinking more critically about what the enterprise needs to maintain business continuity.
Organizations should also consider better risk management of supply chains enabled by hybrid cloud and analysis of external data, allowing for more careful planning and less reactive decision-making.
Finally, they should start to integrate teams around intelligent workflows, helping to realign the business so it’s able to respond quickly to rapidly changing demand signals.
We are not discussing our supply chain status at this time. IBM has launched a company-wide Coronavirus response, which is making some of the company’s key supply chain offerings available at no charge for 90 days including IBM Sterling’s Inventory Visibility, Supply Chain Business Network, Connect and Control Center Director, and Supply Chain Insights with Watson. The IBM resource page can be found here.
These offerings help enable;
Related Article: COVID-19 Disruption Removes Decades of Supply Chain Inertia – Now What?
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