George Harb, has a demonstrated track record of fostering corporate growth, bringing about improvements in operational efficiency, and boosting customer satisfaction levels. He has a total of 25 years of expertise in B2B integration and software sales. Since joining OpenText in 2016, George has served in a variety of senior sales leadership positions. As a senior executive in the B2B software industry with international experience, George specializes in assisting businesses with their digital transformation.


Digital Transformation Enhancing Supply Chain Resilience

While the world is gradually returning to some level of normality, the supply chain industry will take time to recover or return to where it was before. The Pandemic, as well as the daunting challenges faced by the supply chain industry, had a negative impact in recent years. However, digital transformation and the adoption of newer technologies have aided in the strengthening of resilience by improving information about upstream and downstream trading partners as well as suppliers. As a result, trading partners, goods suppliers, manufactured goods, raw materials, and information transparency are thoroughly examined and analyzed, resulting in an immediate decision on what trading partners require to meet the requirements of end consumers. Therefore, for those who have adopted technology, it has created a much more efficient way of sharing information and an ability to analyze the pool of data that has been collected over time to make decisions much easier & help improve effectiveness.

Why do you need to have a Flexible Modern Supply Chain System?

The ideal characteristics of a modern supply chain revolve around flexibility, which is driven by the way information is managed, shared, and used in an organisation; flexibility also applies to understand your trading partner's capabilities and performance in certain scenarios or under certain macro micro impacting factors. And, based on your understanding of how they react, you can make decisions to either shift the request to different suppliers or manage the expectations of your end consumers, so that they understand there are some changes or influences that will delay the delivery of the products or solutions which they're expecting to receive. Therefore, a flexible supply chain is both agile and adaptable, which is a key feature of a modern supply chain.

When looking at the supply chain, flexibility is derived through various organizational means. Thus, it could be resource flexibility, or the ability to move resources from one part of the manufacturing plant to another, or else to move production from one plant to another. The material flexibility will identify suppliers who can source the materials they require to the right place, at the right time, as well as right price. Therefore, the term “Flexibility” aids in adjusting who their end customers are as the nature of demand changes rapidly due to a variety of external factors.

Technology is the fundamental underpinning of the concept "flexibility". Today's technology can make use of the information we get from the various platforms we utilise for our operations, whether they are platforms for ERPs, supply communities, or cooperative supply chains. There are numerous platforms available, and each one is gathering data. Therefore, the question arises on how we are getting access to that data and how are we analysing or interpreting it which will help decide how to build the flexibility that we want in a contemporary supply chain.

The Importance of Supply Chain Transparency

“Transparency provides consumers the confidence from a supply standpoint.”

Information is a crucial part for supply chain driver because it serves as the glue that allows the other supply chain drivers to collaborate and create an integrated, coordinated supply chain. The issue that arises is how to interpret or orchestrate information so that it can be presented to the users, for both internal and external customers. Today, the performance of a supply chain is dependent on information and to deliver information to your users, you must have access to information interpretation or orchestration along with transparency which is the key to everything. However, transparency is only one of the vital elements in ensuring that consumers have access to information about the location and condition of the goods. And, of course, the end users who does want to know about the health of the goods that are passing through the temperature control process and so on. Therefore, seeing that information and being able to track them will give them self-assurance.

Transparency gives consumers the confidence that the app or the purchase is the right choice and provides assurance to purchase more and order more from you as a supplier. So, from the end user's perspective, transparency gives them confidence from a supply standpoint; transparency also creates an environment of trust and retention amongst your customers, which is essential in this world where we're seeing a lot of disruptions today as well as consumers trust in you and your ability to retain them. The element of transparency can only be restored through the analysis of data gathered along the way.

IoT & AI in Supply Chain Management: A Major Step Toward Resilience

For example, consider the ability to track where goods are in transit. Isn't that precisely what IoT does? Today several organizations are incorporating newer technologies into their supply chain processes. And the main reason for this is to provide instant access to information about where those goods are at any given time. So, from that perspective, IoT aids in the collection and tracking of data, which is fantastic.

Further, it gives you the precise information you require at any time to perhaps counsel someone. But suppose you add artificial intelligence to your process. You're taking the point-in-time data you're getting from IoT, whether it's a destination for the items, a path for their transportation, or their manufacture. By using algorithms and methodology to consider what this information means, we may also track the health of the commodities themselves with AI.
Therefore, by using artificial intelligence to analyse the data, you are able to give internal users as well as the end users a view of what that information means to them. For example, if some items that are sitting inside a shipping container. The IoT will then send back a signal to indicate that the temperature inside the cabin or inside the container story has reached a certain threshold. Now that it has reached that level, what does it do with the information that is sent back to the suppliers' supply systems. Since the threshold indicates that the products inside the container are no longer of excellent quality, the algorithms ensure that if it crosse, a shipment of new items is sent out immediately. This reduces the amount of time it takes for the replacement products to achieve or get to the end user.

Charting the Growth Trajectories for Supply Chain Industry

The supply chain will continue to evolve. And I believe the biggest problem that the supply chain industry is currently facing are how to improve or promote a more efficient supply chain that revolves around something we currently refer to as the "data gap," which is basically a piece of information that is being stored or captured in siloed applications. Furthermore, these programs don't always communicate with one another in a way that improves the use of information. So, what a lot of supply chain organizations are looking at is how can we capture that data and ensure the information travels along the supply chain in a dynamic way to multiple sources at the same time, rather than in a linear way, which is a traditional way of looking at the supply chain.

Additionally, the data being gathered simultaneously at every location is processed in the required manner. Therefore, data going to point A doesn't necessarily need to be in the same format, orchestration, or interpretation as the data going to another destination. And that is crucial to the evolution of supply chains, particularly when you consider that in the future, with the development of technologies like block chain, robotics, drones, and wearable technology, there will be an increase in the amount of data flowing into supply chains for organizational applications. So, there is a tremendous amount of additional technology that is being created which is now becoming more and more mainstream.

To design a supply chain that is fit to flourish in future, supply chain leaders should anticipate how key forces of change will impact their supply chains and look to evolve their supply chain management approaches accordingly. This inflection point is an opportunity for forward-thinking supply chain leaders to build future-fit supply chains that both drive progress on top procurement priorities and advance the sustainable business agenda. Therefore, supply chain leaders should foresee how important forces of change will affect their supply networks and strive to modify their supply chain management practises accordingly in order to construct a supply chain that is ready to thrive in the future.