Moving past Covid disruptions

A worldwide supply chain shut down wasn’t really part of the SCM/logistics conversation until the pandemic. And even though at the time of this writing much of the world has returned to “normal,” the supply chain is still reeling. Call it an ongoing ripple effect.

We learned that the traditional end-to-end supply chain model could not withstand the disruptive effects of the pandemic, and that most supply chains were often “in the dark” when it came to the analytics required to make a pivot.

The pandemic also exposed the lack of connectivity between business owners, suppliers, and customers when it came to the data that drives a business, and also the lack of connectivity between the systems that support SCM.

Most supply chain professionals were simply caught flat-footed by the shutdown, stuck in place, like an overloaded container ship in the Suez Canal.

The good news is that solution providers jumped into action, building new technologies and tools for supply chain management that could help fix what was currently broken (moving companies more toward the Resilient model), and help ensure it wouldn’t break again (moving toward the Agile and Aligned models).