However, supply chain resilience is not one-dimensional. To create a resilient operation, organisations are investing in the four pillars of resilience: Visibility, flexibility, collaboration, and control. Additionally, securing a strong foundation on talent development, processes, data, and technology would also be key.
The journey towards supply chain resilience will depend on many factors, including success criteria and the baseline. Tools such as Advanced Planning and Scheduling (APS) solutions, Spend Cubes, Processing Mining solutions, Industry 4.0 solutions, etc. take organisations a long way.
For many organisations, technology advancements such as an APS solution enable improving both internal and external supply chain management through better connectivity, visibility, and collaboration. Indian organisations across multiple sectors including consumer business, pharmaceuticals, Oil & Gas are already seeing holistic strategies that leverage the latest APS solutions by integrating sales, marketing, and procurement with supply planning to rapidly assess the impact of business decisions, evaluate what-if scenarios, and perform root cause analysis to identify improvement opportunities.
In addition to APS solutions, there is an emergence of exponential technologies/innovations that are enabling organisations to transform supply chains and make a shift towards building an agile and resilient supply chain. Some of these include technologies for cognitive demand sensing and social media-based sentiment profiling which when coupled with AI algorithms provides real-time insights surpassing traditional methods, thereby improving the forecast accuracy. This aids in anticipating future disruptions in the supply chains using a combination of multiple external factors and therefore making businesses better equipped.
To cite a few examples in India, a large consumer chemical company leverages AI to deliver products to over 70,000 channel partners nearly 3-4 times a day and the stock delivered even gets sold 90% of times, within just 3 hours of delivery. A large consumer business organisation in India has deployed chat-bots to conduct autonomous negotiations with suppliers, coupling it with advance analytics/AI on historical procurement and pricing patterns. This is further being leveraged to trigger “Alternate vendor development” requirements.While organisations in India have adopted or are in the process of implementing advanced technologies in the supply chain, there are set of roadblocks/hurdles that they face on an on-going basis.
- Definition of digital: Creation of awareness and setting up a digital mindset. Organisations need to differentiate between an Enterprise Application implementation and digital interventions such as AI, IoT, etc.
- Fragmented data across the network and quality of data: Measurement of dimensions that were not considered as priority in the past including conversion of data present in hard copies
- Alignment on return on investment with internal stakeholders and shareholders: Apportionment of investment cost to various functions / business units and the associated benefit derived
- Timelines to achieve benefits from a tech implementation: Expectation of benefits in a shorter time and not providing sufficient time to improve data quality, design set up, etc.
- Integration of multiple platforms: The choice of one single platform vs best of each functional tech platforms
- Scaling up from a “Proof of concept”: While proof of concepts are rolled out with limited data/regions/plants, the ability to scale up for multi-country, multi-platform, multi-supply chain set up
- The complexity of regulations, especially in the pharma sector
- Availability of talent and capability for the new tech platforms
However, with a phase-wise implementation approach, deploying proven technologies addressing at least 75% of the business requirements and access to accurate data can help streamline such implementations. Emphasis should also be on capability development to build new skills and enabling robust change management.
Today, organisations in India, prior to any implementation, have started investing significant time during the preparation stage on “Product value” and creating awareness on business outcomes among the user groups and business units. Therefore, a proper understanding and assessment of the various hurdles would help organisation build an effective implementation and adoption strategy.
The author is Partner, Deloitte India.
