Demand planning, procurement, inventory management, and sales and operations planning can no longer function as separate, loosely connected departments. Supply chain leaders today have to build concurrency into their operations to maximize performance outcomes. End-to-end concurrent planning is the way of the future Doing so would elevate supply chain performance in a way that we desperately need. But we can break down barriers that have long kept various lanes from collaborating effectively.
The challenge is we can’t easily unravel what we’ve established. Supply chain leaders can’t keep up with emerging trends or respond to disruption when it arises. These communication channels are too slow.
In fact, global consultancy McKinsey’s survey of supply chain executives found that spreadsheets are the top planning method, used by 73%. Spreadsheets, emails, presentations, and phone calls have been the primary means by which stakeholders across the supply chain distribute information. We’ve also grown dependent on modularized point solutions and static ways of data-sharing. In volatile times, this separation makes it hard for function managers to work together, but even in good times this structure is inefficient. Critical activities like inventory management, supply planning, and demand planning have existed in silos. Part of the problem is how we’ve approached different supply chain functions. The pandemic wreaked havoc with global supply chains, and many organizations are still recovering. However, in spite of these improvements, our supply chains are still relatively inefficient and fragile. Brands today can design and deliver complex goods to customers faster than ever. The positive consequence of this is our supply chains are more cost-effective and sophisticated. Meanwhile, planners have focused on optimizing discrete functions and improving their forecasting capabilities with the goal of making planning easier across the board.
Many companies have turned to overseas suppliers in hopes of reducing costs and leveraging outside specialization. Over the past 30 years, supply chains have expanded dramatically and become more complicated. The legacy supply chain planning model is broken It was only a matter of time before executives realized the strategic importance of the supply chain, as well as the long-term shortcomings of our legacy practices.īut how exactly does the traditional supply chain planning model fall short? And, more importantly, what is the way forward? The time to answer these questions – and reimagine how we plan within our supply chains – is now. However, the supply chain renaissance we’re experiencing now was driven by decades of underlying factors of change and the unraveling of once successful practices. These days the only constant is change, so we have to adapt.įor many, the catalyst for these realizations was the COVID-19 pandemic. If insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results, futility is doing the same thing and expecting the same results, when the world has changed. Black swan events wreak havoc on supplier networks. The strategies, tools and processes we’ve relied on for decades no longer suffice. We’re in the midst of a major paradigm shift in the supply chain planning world.
0 kommentar(er)
