When a disruption hits your supply chain, that is not the time to start planning. Organizations must have their contingency plans ready to go before something happens and swiftly adjust the flow of materials, products, and other resources as needed when things change. Time is money. The slower an organization is to identify the impacts of a disruption, the higher their procurement costs. In an environment where customers expect lightning-fast service and delivery, organizations that are slower to respond are also more likely to lose customers to faster and more reliable businesses.
Leveraging specific technologies can enable a faster response to unexpected supply chain disruptions.
Leverage Technology for Faster Response Times
In many respects, the challenge to respond quickly to disruption is a data management challenge. Ideally, supply chain organizations should be taking in data from multiple sources, including news alerts, customer feedback, weather forecasts, legal filings, and much more—and the status of each of these inputs can shift by the second. Technology can be a helpful enabler via supply chain risk notification systems, for example, that can aggregate and normalize many of these inputs, monitor them based on an organization’s specific concerns, and provide automatic alerts for any outlying trends.
It’s not enough to know that a change happened: You also need to know whether a given change impacts your organization specifically and your suppliers’ (and their suppliers’) materials, sites, commodities, and products. Mapping your supply chain (including second- and third-tier suppliers) helps to provide clarity about the impact of disruptions you’re facing and what it will take to get back on track. As these tools evolve to provide near real-time visibility into disruptions around the world, many of them:
- include hundreds of thousands of suppliers, sites, parts, and raw materials,
- leverage AI to monitor millions of news feeds across languages and regions,
- evaluate security vulnerabilities and risks posed by external suppliers and vendors,
- enable easy reporting of supplier disruptions, and
- include predictive analytics to help identify the impact of disruptions and predict performance months into the future.
Explore the time it takes organizations to identify the impacts of disruption in APQC's article, The Need for Speed in the Face of Supply Chain Disruptions.