How to enable organizations to successfully balance customer demand, internal efficiency and innovation? Rethinking the Supply Chain to successfully deliver added value in an everchanging and globalized setting requires vision, technology and change management.
Those where the days… when we exchanged insights without fear of exchanging a virus. The date was Thursday 20 February 2020. The venue where we met: Living Tomorrow. Nomen est omen – a name is a destiny. Looking back, we all wish ‘tomorrow’ would look more than a little bit differently. The 2020 CIMCIL Symposium offered some inspiring insights from various Supply Chain experts and explained how we can cope with the rapidly evolving digital market and cover today’s demands from people and processes both within and outside of your organization.
Global trends
Hans Maertens, Managing Director of VOKA, discussed 3 trends shaping Supply Chains and logistics.
- The first trend was trends in globalization. Technology allows us to easily and swiftly communicate with others across the globe.
- The second trend he discussed, was Supply Chain sustainability. All over the world, youth is championing for an environmental change. Networks are configured in a smarter way, Logistics are becoming cleaner and need to emit less and less CO2.
- The third trend is a changing society and demography. Western European societies face an increasingly aged population, could industry4.0 be a help ?
Organizations can successfully face these three trends by embracing digitalization and innovation to drive their Supply Chains and by working towards a more efficient, yet sustainable global future.
From S&OP to strategy-driven S&OP
Bram Desmet, author & Supply Chain expert, shared his vision on rethinking the Supply Chain and helping companies to strategically use their Supply Chain to create a competitive advantage. The mission of Supply Chain management is to balance the Supply Chain triangle using processes, tooling and analytics to integrate strategy, finance and operations. The goal is a higher ROCE or Return On Capital Employed.
The Supply Chain triangle represents the struggle between:
- sales (service)
- operations (cost)
- finance (cash)
In order to bring balance to the Supply Chain triangle, an organization needs a strategy built on their customer’s expectations. Different strategies will lead to different balances and your defined strategy will impact the design of your Supply Chain.
How Data and Analytics drive a Digital Supply Chain
Bart Van der Vurst, Director Analytics at element61, shared some inspirational and hands-on examples of how data and analytics drive a digital Supply Chain. From using AI to improve Supply Chain planning to enabling preventive maintenance for equipment based on predictive forecast using IoT. The essence is a data-driven Supply Chain benefiting internal teams and processes, external partners and the customer.
There are multiple stages in capturing added value from data and analytics:
- What happened?
- Why did it happen?
- What will happen?
- What should I do?
The baseline however is always the same: a digital Supply Chain requires a connectivity layer. Built on top of this connectivity layer, a data foundation and analytics running on a modern data platform allow for integration and data applications.
But in reality, a lot of organizations face challenges like limited hands-on experience, unknown choice of technology and lack of consolidated efforts. Some are working with information manually entered into Excel, with data that are only descriptive and not always very reliable.
For organizations to transform their Supply Chain into a digital one, it is important to know that it is a marathon, not a sprint. In order to tackle the trade-off between maturity and time spent on data collection vs. decision making, they will need people, tools, processes and - most of all – and end-to-end plan. By identifying gaps and opportunities, implementing the right technology and crunching your data, the digital Supply Chain builds competitive edge and opens new business opportunities.
Increasing organizational efficiency and effectiveness
Presenting his findings on organizational efficiency and effectiveness, Edwin Van Vlierberghe believes there are 5 major enablers to achieve an integrated Supply Chain:
- lean logistics
- interface management
- high performing suppliers
- Supply Chain organization
- digitalization
all ensure integrated material and information flows throughout the Supply Chain resulting in high-performing teams achieving goals on time, quality and costs.
But how does one drive digitalization in the Supply Chain? Edwin discusses 3 drivers for organizational change:
- business components (“How can new technology serve us?”)
- ensured employee involvement from the beginning
- a consistent leadership style.
In the Supply Chain of the future, digitalization is a tool enabling new organizational design as the vehicle for success. The digital Supply Chain is an integrated Supply Chain without traditional handovers and focus on functional performance, but instead one that thrives on smooth and streamlined processes.
Our four speakers illustrated some invigorating examples on how to drive the Supply Chain towards value creation in an increasingly digital environment. From identifying global trends and enablers across the digital Supply Chain, to strategically setting goals and sharing specific examples of analytics driving a digital Supply Chain – the 2020 CIMCIL Symposium was able to enlighten 100+ Supply Chain professionals on the exciting and digital Supply Chain of the future.
In the meantime, COVID-19 has changed the world. However, we are continuing to share information across the supply chain community through the means of webinars.
