The Pandemic Made Business Structurally Harder Than Ever

Today’s supply chain processes span internal operations, multiple tiers of upstream and downstream trading partners, and reach down to the end consumer. These processes, and the inherent dynamics of demand, supply and transportation, are all connected, interdependent and highly reactive. Few companies have sufficiently invested in connecting end-to-end processes and systematically leveraging current information to build resilience.

Data and insights from this study find there are key steps decision makers can take to proactively manage these risks, better achieve corporate goals and emerge stronger after major disruptions:

• Use AI and real-time data to sense demand, understand the impact of current market realities and better predict what customers will order.
• Consider multi-echelon inventory optimization combined with demand sensing. Data reveals that the use of multi-echelon inventory optimization helped reduce safety stock by 23%. When combined with better forecasts from sensing demand, this number increased to 42%.