siliconindia | | November 20209Although the current crisis has sent shock waves through global supply chains, it did not, by itself, because the breakdown of existing supply chain paradigms. In fact, it surfaced fault lines that were already in place for some time, accelerat-ing the unraveling of a longstand-ing trade structure. For some sup-ply chain leadership teams, the path of least resistance will be to react and improvise as best they can, on a situation-by-situation basis. In our experience, such piecemeal contin-gency plans and relatively superficial management tactics will yield piece-meal results and a skin-deep business resilience. Our experience suggests the supply chain organizations that will emerge strongest are those will-ing, by contrast, to see current emer-gency conditions as their opportunity to systemically overhaul their entire operating model. The most success-ful leaders will be those who can dis-til insight from a sea of data points, distinguish between leading indica-tors of significant long-term secular trends and high-profile outliers, and turn insight into action. And do this entire thing with minimum latency / reaction time. The new normal will call for more agile manufacturing operations as well, as businesses rapidly shift production plans and retool factory floors to build products now deemed essential. And with worker health and safety a top priority, manufacturers will need to be able to quickly im-plement a range of safety measures, such as distancing practices on as-sembly lines. Workforce safety mod-ules that can be turned on at a mo-ment's notice can help manufacturers swiftly pivot to address a sudden health emergency. Today's supply chain is broad, deep, and continually evolving, which means that it must be agile to be effective. In the past, supply chains met enterprise and customer needs through a beginning-to-end model that was largely unaffected by change. Consumers now have multiple choices in how they pur-chase products--in stores, online, and more. They have also come to expect increasing levels of customi-zation. An agile and zero latency supply chain can deliver on those expectations.With today's SCM parameters, the cloud is a natural ally, in part be-cause cloud-based applications are inherently more flexible and adapt-able to change. Cloud solutions are also inherently architected to make better use of the technologies that are becoming pervasive in the new normal. Retrofitting your environ-ment so these technologies can func-tion on legacy applications is both complicated and expensive.Another significant benefit of in-tegrating the cloud into your SCM system is that you can adopt elements of cloud based SCM depending on your specific business needs, without undertaking a full-scale migration. Many companies find themselves with a short-term need to rational-ize their move to the cloud. The best SCM systems help you extract more value from your current assets and customize your cloud integration to suit your SCM needs, both now and into the future.The new normal will call for a zero latency supply chain operation, where the entire sourcing to receive, product lifecycle management, or-der to cash, plan to manufacture and maintain and logistics are near real time sensitive to any changes, fluc-tuation or abnormalities and able to execute rule based decision system across the SCM and Back office ex-ecution system. Remote working is going to be neo normal and that re-quires complete support from your supply chain management system which legacy technology platform will struggle to address. Going for-ward we will also see an added em-phasis on worker health and safety and without modern emerging tech-nology support it will be quite a difficult task to achieve. Cloud solutions are also inherently architected to make better use of the technologies that are becoming pervasive in the new normalHirak Kayal
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