Ensuring Supply Chain Resilience During Geo-Political Disruptions

Geo-political disruptions are on the rise and as per the US National Intelligence Council’s Global Trends 2040 report, the competition for global influence is expected to reach its highest level since the Cold War in the next two decades.

The latest crises spurred by the Russia-Ukraine conflict have led the CXOs to rethink globalization and re-evaluate the supply chain resilience. The acute shortages of wheat, corn, oil, Nickel, and Palladium, among other disruptions have forced supply chain managers to take a breather from their usual management routine and “think outside” the box. 

A 2020 Gartner survey revealed that as much as 87% of supply chain executives planned to invest in resilience over the next two years but reducing costs remained a major focus.

However, the recent Russia-Ukraine conflict pushed the focus to resilience, with more than 3 out of 4 supply chain professionals putting it first, in a 2023 Deloitte survey. The survey also identified four critical pillars of supply chain resilience, namely – visibility, flexibility, collaboration, and control.

Here are some actionable tips supply chain leaders and businesses can follow that encompass all the four pillars of supply chain resilience.

#1 – Intelligent Automation for End-to-End Visibility

The executive supply chain surveys by EY reveal that increased supply chain visibility is the top priority for 61% of supply chain executives for the next year.

Having visibility over the entire supply chain ecosystem down to multiple tiers of service providers and processes not only arms the key stakeholders with real-time insights into the key areas but also paves the way for proactive supply chain management.

Businesses can identify the areas or events that can evolve into business risks and ensure preventive measures are in place well ahead of time. 

Intelligent supply chain automation platforms with built-in workflows for the entire shipment lifecycle, automated triggers for communication, and integrated management dashboards emerge as clear winners with their powerful capabilities.

The ability to manage, monitor, control, and execute operations across different parties and business components, owing to direct visibility over the entire supply chain empowers businesses in an unprecedented manner.

Getting predictive alerts for delays, multiple carriers, and shipping lines to choose from, and real-time consignment status tracking with key milestone reporting on a single interface – such platforms help businesses unlock supply chain resilience in an effective way.

#2 – Predictive Analytics for Improved Flexibility and Control

Supply chain flexibility enables rapid adjustments to disruptions without substantially impacting operational expenses.

This ability to quickly adapt to disruptions, changing demand patterns, and supply chain complexities, ensures business continuity and boosts supply chain resilience.

According to recent studies, sourcing analytics is a fundamental supply chain transformation technology as per 88% of supply chain executives.

Advanced supply chain platforms with built-in data analytics provide businesses with the insights and intelligence needed to optimize operations and make informed decisions. Analytics for fulfillment monitoring, predicting potential exceptions, and automating mitigation or recommending the next best actions make supply chains resilient.

Predictive modeling takes data analytics to the next level, enabling supply chain managers to anticipate future events and proactively optimize operations. By analyzing historical data, current trends, and external factors, predictive models can forecast future demand levels, potential disruptions, supply chain risks, and more.

These forecasts empower businesses to proactively adjust inventory levels, optimize production schedules, and prepare for potential disruptions, ensuring smooth and efficient operations, with minimal degradation.

#3 – Supply Chain Integration for Collaborative Decision-Making

88% of supply chain professionals agree that increasing collaboration can improve planning & fulfillment, and 56% of them feel the need to improve the information flow to get rid of “information blindspots” and improve visibility.

Collaboration is essential for optimizing supply chains across different business components and service providers. Further, standardized processes and data nomenclature are crucial to collaborative decision-making.

Integrating multiple supply chain components and ensuring centralized collaboration and communication among multiple stakeholders can help businesses navigate sudden disruptions with minimal business impacts.

The ability to choose from hundreds of transportation options, carriers, and service providers, enables them to expedite shipment movements and ensure timely as well as safe deliveries even during uncertain times. Further, the ability to execute first, middle, and last mile operations via a single dashboard helps overcome confusion and reduces the number of man-hours required to complete different tasks.

With technologies like AI, ML, IoT, predictive modeling, and cloud computing, businesses can not only witness unprecedented efficiencies across resources, fuel, and costs, but they can also unlock granular visibility across the entire supply chain.

Intelligent automation facilitates seamless management and deeper control over disparate operations and processes via ready-to-use and configurable workflows.

Further, the ability to track, monitor, and manage assets and execute supply chain operations from a single dashboard paves the way for increased resilience in supply chains, making them the right choice for the first step towards robust functioning.