Next-Gen SupplyChains: Underpinning your ability to manage complexity and drive innovation

This is an excerpt of the original article. It was written for the January-February 2024 edition of Supply Chain Management Review. The full article is available to current subscribers.

January-February 2024

Back in 2019, we seemed on a consistent path to the future. Then COVID-19 arrived on the global scene, and all predictions went out the window. As 2024 begins, everyone wants to know what the year will look like. I predict continued interest in circular supply chains, cybersecurity, visibility, and digital supply chains, to name a few. But I am not alone. So, I’d like to share five things that I am particularly interested in this year.

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Supply chains lack the required “high-fidelity” data and capabilities to operate in today’s complex business climate that is characterized by excessive supplier and logistics risks and disruptions, rapidly evolving sustainability and geopolitical requirements, growing implications of customer centricity, and hybrid channels to market. Successful organizations must pursue a different approach to innovate and re-invent their supply chains. Firms that cannot will fail as they are characterized by flatlined revenues, longer lead times, bloated inventory, and shrinking margins with surging SG&A (selling, general, and administrative) costs.

The role of supply chains has significantly evolved from the basic needs of satisfying customers (1990s), to servicing global markets (2000s), to driving profitability (2010s), to enabling customer centricity and differentiation while managing complexity in today’s markets. Managing complexity, whilst enabling resilience, is the operative phrase as supply chains today are a CEO and board-level mandate with a focus on reinvention, with more change in the last four years than in the previous 40 years. The success and evolution of all companies are underpinned by creating new high-fidelity supply chains with a forward-looking lens that incorporates three critical success factors (CSF) to future-proof organizations and enable resilience.

Based on extensive academic research and extensive industry experience, we apply these three factors discussed below, using a new approach to drive your next-gen supply chain transformation strategy. By understanding and incorporating these factors, supply chain transformation strategies can pivot from the traditional top-down, large-scale, process-driven reengineering approaches that lack agility and results.

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