COVID-19, the Suez Canal incident, the ‘Great Resignation’… several reasons for disruption in the supply chain. Now more than ever, supply chains need to be resilient. What the past few years have revealed is how connected our supply chains are globally. That’s why we need to be unified in our move to solve supply chain disruption. As we learned at our recent GDS Supply Chain Summit, evolving for the future requires hyper connected collaboration, real-time interactions, machine to human translations, transparency and visibility. Here are some key takeaways from keynote speaker, Purvee Kondall, Senior Director of Technology and Engineering Sourcing at Albertsons.
Evolving for the Future
Why do we need to move from transition to transformation? What we have seen in the past few years is that we are in a very globally connected supply chain. It’s always been known and experienced but now there is an awareness that we are super connected and so dependent on each other. We need to figure out a way to evolve together so we have less disruptions and more sustainability.
Digital Enablement as Table Stakes
Many businesses thought they never had to worry about going digital because their sales were primarily in person. However, the last two years turned those thoughts around. Digital enablement is now front and center. As Purvee notes, “if we’re not thinking digital we will probably be outdated and no longer able to compete in this landscape, that’s why digital enablement is so important to every organization globally.”
Hyper Connected Collaboration
We are now living in a world where we can have real-time interactions from anywhere at any time. We are now relying on machines to do things for us which leads to transparency and visibility. “Gone are the days where information is withheld or centralized or stays within just one group or a few people. We must take all that information and turn it into insights. It’s not enough to have data lakes, it’s not enough to have massive servers with all kinds of information that is siloed. Those insights are crucial to solving today’s supply chain challenges,” Purvee shares.
Re-Defined Competitive Landscapes
Who we used to think were our competitors, are no longer, within our respective industries. The competitive landscape has been redefined. We now need to ask ourselves; how do we evolve for the future? “One of the key things we need to think about is diversity of thought, experiences which can bring so much opportunity. As leaders if we are open to embracing that we’re going to be ready to evolve for the future.”
Transition State
“When we’re in a transition state and told by leaders to make changes, we start to make the moves required. We accept changes as they occur. We think about doing things differently because we have to, not because we want to. When we are in a transition state there is a lot of alignment but safety in numbers is and aligning our teams is how we move toward a transformation state,” Purvee says.
Transformation State
When an organization enters a transformation state, they are now able to take risks and can be intentional about our vision, not letting fear stop us. As Purvee shares, its changing from thinking why we can’t transform to why not transform. “Supply chain disruption is a globally shared disruption and it’s led to a change in people. How we think about things has changed dramatically. What we have assumed to be the case previously has turned out not to be the case. New rule books are being written and at this point we are flying the plane while we are building it.”
Explore What’s Out There
There is so much happening within supply chain transformation. From robotic enablement to AI and ML applications, to autonomous warehouses and drone powered transportation hubs. All these options are going to help your organization use data as a revenue generation engine. Purvee says establish partnerships within your organization, “when we have a shared goal and a shared outcome, we’re going to be successful together. Try to bring everyone along in the journey, open and enable tools that will help everyone understand where the pain points are and move forward together in the transformation journey.”
Scale During Transformation
Ideation starts from the bottom up but the implementation and/or adoption happens top down. “It’s been interesting to me in some of the board conversations that I have had across industries, the board members are very much aware of the need to transform and astute recognition for everyone in the organization to be in a transformation state, all stakeholders need to adopt it but it’s those innovators, those that think outside the box that are making these transformations happen. That’s why creating environments where diverse problem solving can take place is critical.”
Solving Disruption Together
How can you unlock these opportunities and think of supply chain transformation differently?
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