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.

Buying a high-tech solution that appears to quickly address an identified need or problem is tempting, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. So why resist? In short, the attractive easy out rarely pays off in the long run. According to the authors’ research, the ability to resist tempting but low-value IT investments is a hallmark of higher-performing companies. This article examines five temptations resisted by high performers, and outlines what they chose to do instead. The first temptation many companies face is to limit the application of new technologies to quick-payoff, high-visibility processes. The higher-value choice is to reimagine business processes across the company, not just in customer-facing areas. The second temptation is to patch or “lift-and-shift” legacy systems. The higher-value choice is to see the cloud not simply as a data centre but as a catalyst for innovation. The third temptation is to experiment with “hot” technologies in isolation. The higher-value choice is to identify foundational technologies and adopt them based on their potential effect on the entire organization. The fourth temptation is to rely on standard classroom training programs. The higher-value choice is to take a more flexible, future-focused approach. The fifth temptation is to move responsibility for IT to business leaders. The higher-value choice is to embrace systems that break down boundaries constraining data, infrastructure, and applications.