No industry, geography, or channel has been spared from supply chain disruption as the COVID-19 pandemic has spread. Enough has been said about the pandemic, consumer trend shifts, demand volatility and the challenges supply chains have been facing so this write-up does not dwell into that. While the world continues to battle the virus, supply chain officers continue to figure out how to outmaneuver uncertainty.
Over the last 4 weeks, I have received several speaking or interview requests from my network of supply chain peers. While it is tempting to talk about what is going on, I have refrained from discussions particularly because time is of the essence these days and navigating a global supply chain through this Covid-19 pandemic is taking its toll on a daily basis. Furthermore, as an officer of a publicly traded company, I am not at liberty to discuss specifics around what we are doing, therefore this expert comment is for educational purposes only. Nothing I share here should be interpreted as a guidance of our performance or actions we are taking specifically for our supply chain.
While there is no playbook for a sustained disruption like this Pandemic, and it is baptism by fire every day, I still believe that the foundations of managing a supply chain continue to remain deep rooted in the following five areas. To succeed as a supply chain officer during these trying times, these cannot be ignored.
- Talent. If you do not have the ‘right’ talent driving your supply chain, you are already losing. ‘Right’ here does not mean somebody who is an expert in supply chain, but rather a team of people operating with resilience and flexibility – you don’t need everyone to be an expert in Supply Chain, you just need a few leaders. A correct blend of resources in the team relying on each other with the right attitude and a deep-rooted understanding of the implications of what they are doing to the business – every step of the way. It is these talented and resilient people who will turn the tide of victory in your favor. If you find such talent out there in the market, pick them up if you can afford to, because they will pay back many times over.
2. Systems, technology, and data. If you are still working with system, technology or data constraints and limitations in any area of your supply chain, you are wasting time doing non-value-added work and increasing the complexity of the uncertainty exponentially these days. If you don’t have visibility into your data and the right analytics in play to answer the critical questions you are asking daily, you are flying blind. You better get IT on your side to help you with stuff or else you’re going to be working more hours than you can afford to and severely limited in your ability to course correct quickly. Now I am not professing you go out there and make significant investments which will disrupt and not payback quickly – those need to be evaluated when the time is right and you post-mortem all your failures after the pandemic is over. What you need to do right now is make incremental changes which help you right now to get your supply chain aligned quickly.
3. Strategic partnerships. It is imperative to ensure that all your partners are orchestrating in unison and executing on your strategy to push forward during these uncertain times. Thinking about win-win scenarios with your partners is critical or else they will not be able to support your strategy. Now is not the time to build new partnerships (and there are several reasons why that maybe the case) but renew and rely on your existing partners to step up and help you. Your partners also see this as an opportunity to strengthen their relationships with you with a ‘we are in this together’ mentality. If your partners are not stepping up or rather taking advantage of your situation, it is time to reevaluate those partnerships and move away from them. Bad partners will limit your supply chain execution. Hopefully, you have a diversified strategy with your partners, so you can move that business to another existing partner (if you don’t that is another area you need to be looking into when the pandemic is over). It also helps to eliminate any financial barriers that impact your partnerships so make sure you keep those in mind working with your CFO and his organization.
4. Communication. Clear, consistent, concise and cohesive communication (I call it the 4C strategy) is absolutely critical both internally as well as externally within your supply chain. Nothing disrupts a supply chain more than teams and partners not knowing what to do and where you are going. Since status quo will not work, this is the time to invoke your crisis communication strategy. If you do not have communication trees for supply chain disruptions, that is another area to work on after the pandemic. Tough decisions that impact partners or groups adversely must be communicated. Everything should jive well across your entire supply chain or else confusion will generate more issues than you need. Also eliminating ambiguity becomes critical because 80% of their supply chain involves people who need to get clear crisp directions on what to do and how to do it. Avoid “if ‘s and buts”, eliminate gray situations especially for the critical-doers and gain buy-in from the decision-makers. This is a lot of work and falls squarely on you as an officer.
5. Build agility and responsiveness with resilience. You cannot afford not to have an agile, resilient and flexible culture in your supply chain these days. I have spoken at length about the differences between the concepts of lean and agile in our supply chains, so I will not dwell into that here. However, for people who do not understand what an agile supply chain is, it basically refers to the use of responsiveness, competency, flexibility, and quickness to plan and execute efficiently with a focus on profitability rather than just cost savings. Being agile involves responding profitably to variable consumer demand, planning with the assumption that your plans must be continuously altered and focusing on execution day in and day out with the knowledge and information available at your disposal. This is the only way during the pandemic that you will be able to course correct quickly. Course correction is inevitable. You will need to plan for various scenarios, limit the risks you can take, and execute as efficiently as possible. Do not dwell into decisions made in the past which are impacting you now because they were the best decisions under the circumstances and with the information you had at that point in time. Forging ahead and course correcting is the only way to move forward. Operating over short periods of time is not easy but necessary as your scenarios continue to change.
You’re probably not going to win every day but the reality is that if you plowed through with the above basic foundational elements, and didn’t make the same mistakes more than once, chances are you and your supply chain will come out in better shape in the future.
A prolonged black swan event like this only highlight’s issues within your supply chain which you know existed but did not have the luxury or priority to fix. When this pandemic is over, make sure you focus on those gaps, fix those issues, and build a supply chain (with people, process, technologies, partners) that is agile and resilient to the next disruption.
Supply Chain Boy 
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