As we wave goodbye to 2020 with its tough lessons, historical norms no longer apply, and for the foreseeable future, business must deal with a new abnormal normal. We all had opinions about the impacts of COVID-19, made assumptions and possessed great degree of wishful thinking in 2021. Businesses today with tiered complex supply chain are faced with challenges that need to be addressed beyond the impacts of COVID-19.  We learned that knowing your tier 1 suppliers is not enough and guarding your supply chain from disruptive events such as COVID-19 is more important for business continuity. Events such as trade wars, natural disasters, sanctions, civil unrest, and strikes are still presenting threats to business continuity beyond COVID-19, in addition to the continuous change of customer expectations when it comes to service and granularization of orders.

The need for Transparency & Flexibility 

It is not enough to simply have lean processes; embedding flexibility, responsiveness, and adaptability in your supply chain gives you a competitive edge in today’s emerging business landscape. So it is crucial to have a transparent real-time view of your end-to end supply chain to identify where are the opportunities, vulnerabilities and weaknesses. The information varies from top-level KPIs, such as overall service level, to very granular process data, such as the exact position of trucks in the network. This range of data provides a joint information basis for all levels of seniority and functions in the supply chain. The integration of data of suppliers, service providers, etc. ensures that all stakeholders steer and decide based on the same facts.

The need for digitalization  

The lack of digitalization leads to managing crucial information in siloed systems and functions. This means that decisions are made with incomplete picture of the benefits and impacts that severely impacts the business. Organizations need technologies that allow them to monitor, manage and observe the impacts of decisions. The next generation of supply chain is a digital supply chain the utilizes the application of Internet of Things (IoT), advanced robotics and advanced analytics of big data. This requires rethinking the way you design your supply chain. The design has to be granular models that facilitates the flow of data across supply chain to meet the demand of customers with wide range of products and customization.  

Getting a grip on Supply chain challenges today  

Based on advanced modeling techniques, prescriptive analytics allows you to create a model of your supply chain that accurately reflects how it works, considering all inputs, outputs, and constraints, together with an ability to measure trade-offs. This form of supply chain modeling allows you to use the large volumes of structured and unstructured data available to your organization to evaluate different scenarios and determine the best way to overcome supply chain challenges and achieve supply chain goals. 

To create an ideal workload in the supply chain, various transparency and dynamic planning approaches are leveraged to drive advanced demand shaping activities.  

At Thynkli, we interrogate data from various systems to achieve business goals, we model supply chain using predictive analytics that looks beyond historical data and provide insights into future supply challenges. 

Contact us to learn how you can leverage data to create flexibility in planning and transparency across your supply chain.