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Building a Resilient Supply Chain

The extensive upheavals spanning from the last several decades, such as the global recession and the COVID-19 pandemic, have demonstrated that firms can suffer severe setbacks if their supply chains are not resilient, affecting the success of any business. Moreover, an entire supply chain becomes vulnerable if just one component is exposed to risk, showing the importance of the efficiency of each part.

A resilient supply chain refers to your business’s ability to utilize its resources effectively to deal with unanticipated supply network disruptions. These can happen at any time. Therefore, this type of resilience involves responding to and overcoming obstacles without disrupting any deadlines or operations.

The statistics from the previous year project why supply chain resilience is so crucial to companies across the globe:

The financial implications of disruptions surrounding supply chains were extensive.

  • Over 16% of businesses claimed to be hit by severe revenue loss.
  • Over 10% of businesses claimed that supply chain disruptions had impacted their brand’s reputation.1
  • Almost 10% of businesses lost regular customers after being involved in a broken supply chain experience.1

It might be worth mentioning that over 70% of organizations don’t have a business operations contingency plan to respond to and overcome disruptions lasting more than several weeks.2

4 Core Elements of a Resilient Supply Chain

A solid and responsive supply chain combines a few necessary components, no matter the vertical or location.

  1. End-to-End monitoring

Firstly, a resilient supply chain needs constant end-to-end monitoring. However, many modern organizations often lack awareness of what is happening with their vendors and customers. Vendors are crucial to success in business, requiring close monitoring.

You need to ensure that issues are identified before they become damaging to your company’s costs and reputation. For example, this can include ransomware attacking your network or a computer component held in shipment. Knowing these issues immediately can allow you to address them directly and update customers efficiently.

  1. Sourcing Diversification

Getting rid of singular points of failure is a vital part of risk mitigation. However, many organizations are still depending on a single vendor, country, or region in supply chain portfolios. It’s undoubtedly worth employing a mix of offshore and near-shore vendors for each component rather than just one. This ensures that if one vendor or region goes down, other vendors from varying locations can step in to help you out.

  1. Incident Tolerance

Strengthen your security, backup, and compliance postures. This will mean that operations can continue even if one vendor or region is impacted. Driving towards building incident tolerance is the main aim, alongside the ability to keep the supply chain running regardless of any given incident.

  1. Agility

All the most successful companies work with an agile mindset. So, what does this mean? These companies approach operations by keeping up to date with market trends and the latest technology. This ensures that they know how to use the industry’s most effective strategies and tools to foresee issues and respond efficiently to them. This puts these successful companies ahead of their competitors.

The Key Enablers of Supply Chain Resilience

There are three essential enablers needed to create an efficient and successful supply chain resilience in these contemporary times: people, processes, and technology.

People

Having a solid crisis management team made up of experts in the field is necessary for the supply chain. By drafting a response playbook and knowing their way around the latest technologies with organizational insights, these people can help keep the system as resilient as possible. Furthermore, mock drills can help prepare the team for disruptions so that responses are practiced and efficient when tackling a real-life issue.

Processes

The most efficient processes help the expert teams perform to their very best standards. Therefore, digitizing processes is incredibly recommended to produce successful results in this area, allowing businesses to access vast amounts of data in real-time. Companies can use this information to make informed decisions concerning vital competencies needed to navigate a crisis.

Technology

The latest technology can improve any organization’s process with accuracy. The best modern technologies can be utilized to create a centralized incident management system. This is one of the best ways to detect problems and manage accountability in the supply chain.

Contigo Technology is always ready to help your business when discussing how to strengthen your supply chain. We strive to be more than just your Austin IT Service Provider; we want to be a reliable business partner.

Sources:

  1. Supply Chain Resilience Report 2021
  2. Accenture – A pragmatic approach to maintaining supply chain resilience in times of uncertainty
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