Forecasting for Fall Uncertainties

Over the past few months, it has faced the supply chain planning community with questions. About how to deal with increase in uncertainty when we enter the fall. While we adjust to COVID-19, we did not handle it. Pandemic forces will continue to affect our business when we enter the fall and move to winter. The availability of extensive vaccines is still 9 to 12 months for most people. The challenges of environmental disturbances and climate continue. Instability and political challenges still dominate the front page.

Scott Lundstrom, analyst, futures supply chain

The relatively stable world of global supply chains has an increase in a way that we cannot imagine. What should be done by supply chain executives? Although it might sound clear at this point. Covid has been impresses with the need for digital transformation. To encourage resilience and agility into our operations.

First and foremost, we need to adopt the outer view of the supply chain. As a business network driven by demand, the supply chain is critical to avoid execution failure, excess inventory. And the undoing bullwhip effects of a chaotic business environment. AI and advanced supply chains and analytic data can help. But only if we have data and processes needed to utilize intelligence in creating agility and resilience.

Changes in philosophy and strategies

Changes in philosophy and strategies – from efficiency to resilience. This has nothing to do with technology. Management of change among senior leaders can be very challenging, but it is an absolute need. Adopting focusing on the thought and customer experience can be difficult after optimizing internal processes to reduce costs and minimize inventory.

Analytics can play a role in getting a better understanding of where we experience difficulties and disappoint customers.

Changes in the agreement source to improve the stability of supply and forecasting demand – the supply chain is a team sport. This is only by working with the partner suppliers that we can increase resilience. A more flexible agreement that allows various ordering actions in multiple categories on request and availability will help make the supply chain less fragile and strict.

Data partners on suppliers of Tier 2 and Tier 3 can help us improve our planning model to include uncertainty in geopolitics, climate, logistics, and pandemic dimensions. Utilizing better data, more details about suppliers may be one of the most significant changes we can do in increasing our planning optimization model’s resilience.

This is also important data if we look forward to utilizing machine and automatic ML learning in our planning model.

Flexibility and local supply

Logistic planning changes embrace the flexibility and local supply – one of the most significant changes we will see in this autumn supply chain is the desire to move towards a more local supply source. Geographical complexity is driven by locking, limited global delivery capacity, and geopolitical instability causes the pendulum to swing back to more local supply sources.

Changes in supply and demand and digital twins – Real improvement in supply chain performance requires more real-time data. Real-time data from customers, suppliers, distributors and logistics suppliers need to be integrated to provide a real-time display of end-to-end processes to meet customer needs. Supply chain software providers increasingly switch to digital and digital screw data models to help provide this visibility.

Analysis algorithms and advanced machine learning are suitable for identifying and resolving problems when given this type of framework. Preparing uncertainty and creating resilience must focus on every supply chain organization when we move to the wave of the next pandemic uncertainty. The organization composed will experience a much higher customer satisfaction level and will experience better business results and performance.