Evolving beyond efficient operations
Where are you in the diagram below?
Most twenty-first century companies are in the Reliable stage. While that beats the purely transactional nature of Efficient Operations, it can be easily disrupted, as the pandemic showed us.
Moving to the Resilient supply chain is, for most companies, currently the ideal. A resilient supply chain is defined by its capacity for resistance and recovery. It can predict and account for volatility in demand and supply, and adjust operations to accommodate such volatility.
But resilient essentially means you’ve created a system that can absorb a few blows. And that’s not enough.
The Adaptive, Agile supply chain connects you closer to your vendors and customers and allows you to both anticipate and influence consumer demand, or lack thereof.
But the ideal stage of supply chain evolution? The Aligned supply chain? Here’s where you can impact the overall market. By moving outside your vertical into data collection and assimilation from the horizontals that support it, and into capturing and sending market signals, you can influence supply and demand, and build a supply chain that predicts and even orchestrates the market rather than merely respond to it.