Unlocking the Potential of Digital Supply Chains

Most global companies have made substantial investments in digital solutions and building deep functional excellence across the supply chain. But few have balanced those efforts with a corresponding push to develop the new competencies required to unlock the full value of digital. To build a supply chain that can sense unforeseen events and nimbly pivot in response, you must do more than retool with a range of the best available new technologies. You must also rethink and reskill your supply chain. In order to rethink a supply chain, you must move from viewing it as an inanimate mechanism built to execute against a plan to perceiving it as a living organism. A pivoting supply chain moves beyond traditional concepts of optimization to make your supply chain attuned to its ever-changing environment and free of a silo mentality. In practical terms, you bring your supply chain to life via uncompromising vision, real-life learning, and sprints (a minimum viable product approach with small and achievable portions of capability building). COVID-19 has delivered costly lessons on the strategic importance of supply chain agility, spurring companies to move beyond retooling their operations for traditional optimization, toward rethinking their basic assumptions about how their supply chains should operate, and toward reskilling their people with a focus on competencies that help supply chains sense and pivot.

• Supply Chain Management, Digital Supply Chains, Pivoting Supply Chains, Supply Chain risk management