There's a significant amount of change taking place in business today, and it requires owners to avoid disruption to their supply chain strategy.
Supply chain management plans will need to take into account automation and tech innovation, new geographies and regional sourcing, increased regulation and climate change.
Automation and Tech Innovation
Extensive job automation can affect your supply chain strategy for the better because it allows organizations to reap the unique strengths of both humans and machines.
"Teaming together human creativity, abstract thinking and adaptive response together with machine precision gets you the best of both worlds, leaving machines in charge of what they do best—easy, repeatable tasks—and freeing humans to be the best they can be," says Dr. Gabriele Rizzo, a futurist adviser for private and public international defense organizations.
But businesses will need to work with labor unions and governments to transition workers into new roles and help them to re- and upskill, and to enforce the appropriate labor laws involving safety, wages and hours. They may also want to consider developing a means to collect worker feedback and adjust operations, so they meet employee needs throughout the march toward automation.
According to Rizzo, implementing automation and other emerging technologies are of utmost importance in building and maintaining an edge in supply chain operations.
"These technologies enable fine-grained gathering of operational data, advanced analysis of processes and impacts and faster decision making," she says.
A 2017 Gartner report predicted that by 2021, virtual customer assistants (VCAs) and chatbots will handle 20 percent of all customer service interactions. Although technology innovations such as VCAs and autonomous mobile robots are getting smarter, human workers are still needed to integrate and oversee their participation—and this often requires a highly specialized, but not always readily available, skillset.
If your supply chain strategy already incorporates data analytics, you're off to a great start. But even so, it's becoming even more important for owners to zero in on the information that's most useful and relevant to them.
Technology-based supplier audits are valuable, as are digital platforms and dashboards that assess the effectiveness of operations and worker sentiment in real time.
To fully leverage Big Data's potential, owners must determine the data science skills required for their operations, and work to source these either internally or externally.
For more where this came from, head over to the American Express Business site.
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