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Supply Chain

Reconfiguring for Competitive Advantage

Deloitte can help you illuminate supply networks to address today’s challenges and identify tomorrow’s opportunities—providing a platform for generating critical insights, optimising business processes and automating supply chain activities across your value chain.

New solutions for the next normal

Could COVID-19 be the black swan event that finally forces many companies and entire industries, to rethink and transform their global supply chain model?

Reconfiguring for Competitive Advantage

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RestartNow balances business restart requirements and employee health in real-time

Our RestartNow Platform is a proven and ready-to-deploy Deloitte Tool Suite to support an efficient operations restart and ramp-up. Consisting of Restart Diagnosis, that assesses readiness and risks, Restart Task Force, deploying  cross-functional task force to manage restart efforts, especially in production, and Restart Simulation & Planning, simulating the restart and ramp-up of the entire supply chain and develop scenarios. 

What this means for business

Manufacturers and distributors that understand and adapt to evolving market dynamics, employee safety and customer needs will be positioned to thrive. The future of customer experience lies in human-centred transactions powered by leading-edge digital solutions.

As the next normal unfolds, business will increasingly deploy solutions such as data-driven customer insights to drive new supply and demand models, AI-enabled 360° working capital monitor for transparency and potential optimisations, and digital learning factory pilots to train employees for restart/ramp-up.

"The most important circumstance to understand is how safety has reasserted itself as a basic human need that will colour every commercial interaction. - A
Human-First Approach as you Recover and Thrive, Deloitte"

Supply Chain Resilience

Supply chains have become highly sophisticated and vital to the competitiveness of many companies. But their interlinked, global nature also makes them increasingly vulnerable to a range of risks.

The shift is now underway from efficient supply chains to resilient supply chains.

The characteristics of efficient supply chains have been

· Lean -Focus on operational excellence, supply chain optimisation and the elimination of waste (costs, materials / inventories, assets).

· Specialised - Establishing centres of excellence, shared services and focussed factories to improve efficiency and cost as a means of differentiation.

· Consolidated - Mergers and acquisitions, integration of operations, and leveraging economies of scale to improve cost and asset performance.

· Reactive - The ability to sense and respond to demand-side and supply-side events and disruptions to quickly re-plan and then align execution.

· Enterprise-focussed - Focus on functional excellence within the company’s supply chain, including direct (Tier 1) suppliers and customers.

The characteristics of resilient supply chains will be

· Diverse - Supply chain design in consideration of geographic diversity, multi-sourcing and capacity to respond to market and supply chain disruption.

· Flexible - The ability to quickly adapt to disruptions without significantly increasing operational costs.

· Collaborative - The ability to develop symbiotic and trust-based relationships with supply chain partners and other key strategic network participants

· Predictive - The ability to predict issues across the extended supply chain and prescribe actions. Concurrent planning and execution.

· Network-focussed - Focus on synchronisation and optimisation of the end-to-end (multi-tier) supply network, enabling co-ordinated actions and risk mitigation

What this means for business

Manufacturers and distributors that understand and adapt to evolving market dynamics, employee safety and customer needs will be positioned to thrive. The future of customer experience lies in human-centred transactions powered by leading-edge digital solutions.

The COVID-19 pandemic crisis has highlighted that most companies need to refine their overall supply chain and risk management strategy with a more holistic view to potential risk and resiliency.

As the next normal unfolds, business will increasingly deploy solutions that address

• Supplier complexity and risk exposure

• Labour and workforce disruption

• Volatile demand situations

• Manufacturing or production disruptions

• Rising freight costs and decreasing customer service

• Complexities in cross-border direct (CIT, transfer pricing) & indirect tax regimes (customs & duties, VAT, Sales Tax, etc.)

• Diverse compliance and reporting requirements by authorities globally

Deloitte’s Supply Chain Risk Management service includes the best-of capabilities from Consulting, Advisory, Tax and Assurance functions to drive supply chains of the world with a holistic and pragmatic approach to respond to crisis situations.

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Addressing the Supply Chain impact of COVID-19 Resilience in the extended enterprise

Resources for resilient leadership Explore actions within the three key phases of crisis: respond, recover, thrive

Using your COVID-19 command centre to build long-term resiliency With a strong command centre directing traffic, an organisation can turn crisis response into a core competency

Establish a “Control Tower” to support holistic supply risk management

A digital approach to supply chain risk management is required – to gain sufficient visibility to supply chain risks. Deloitte’s CentralSightTM is one solution that leverages artificial  intelligence, a machine learning-powered entity  resolution platform, incorporating structured and unstructured data, and leveraging  proprietary and subscription-based databases, to illuminate supply networks in hours to days, providing visibility to extended multi-tier supply chain risk that most companies thought was previously not attainable.

Identify previously-unknown entities in the supply chain, using data sources such as

  •   Bills of lading databases
  •   Government contracts database
  •   Financial performance and credit-worthiness data
  •   Subscription and custom news aggregators
  •   Approved Supplier Lists
  •   Commercial accident & liability databases

What this means for business

Significant cost is driven by unanticipated supply chain disruptions. Organisations often lack a complete understanding of the supply chains on which they rely. Risk mitigation can be inaccurate and the value added by each supplier in the chain is indeterminate. Competitor organisations or nation states can co-opt or cripple critical infrastructure and acquire intellectual property.

• 24% of disruptions occur at tier 2 or below

• 9% decrease in sales due to supply chain disruption

• 11% cost increase due to publicised disruptions

Advances in information and communications technology are enabling the digital supply network of the future through end-to-end supply chain visibility, collaboration, responsiveness, agility and optimisation.

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CentralSightTM supply chain network analytics solution CentralSightTM is an automated platform that utilises advanced analytic techniques to rapidly uncover and illuminate multi-tiered, geographically disaggregated supplier networks and enables clients to capture leading indicators and prevent supply chain disruptions before they occur.

The Supply Chain Control Tower Orchestrate and drive visibility and valuable right time insights

“In today’s rapidly evolving technology landscape, we need to be prepared to navigate the digital revolution in the age of human and machine collaboration,” -David Rudini, Deloitte Global Analytics Lead

How technology customers’ needs are changing

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the shift from physical to virtual interactions brought safe and reliable connectivity to the fore. Post-pandemic, the ability of digital connections to keep business, public services, remote work and home life running will continue to be one of our most essential needs.

Enterprise customers and personal consumers alike will share the same basic needs: fast and reliable computing hardware and mobile devices; speedy and secure connectivity even when network demand surges; responsive and empathetic customer service to solve technical problems quickly and virtually; a stream of new and innovative solutions; and flexible pricing options. Meanwhile, in physical spaces such as retailers, restaurants and health providers, users will look for ‘touchless’ interactions and other creative solutions that minimise contact and prioritise safety.

What this means for business

With connectivity as king in the next normal, technology and telecom companies’ first priority will be to hasten the delivery and adoption of 5G service and hardware. They will also be looking to help customers undergo cloud transformation and implement the software-as-a-service solutions that will enable enterprises to tackle future operations and workforce challenges. Underpinning all this will be a laser focus on state-of-the-art cyber protection.

Technology and telecom businesses will also need new tools to take customer service to a new level. Using data-driven insights and AI tools, they can tailor new pricing models, subscription services and offers to individual customer needs, and deploy innovative customer touchpoints, such as chatbots or video consultations, to respond to technical problems and questions in real time. With confidence in digital connectedness likely to grow as an essential human and business need, the technology companies that can provide it to their customers will be best positioned to thrive.

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COVID-19: People, technology and the path to organisational resilience This latest piece examines the responsibility that IT leaders have to not only lead their function through the current pandemic, but also to support the entire enterprise, especially since technology has become increasingly woven into the fabric of business.

COVID-19: Shaping the future through digital business Never has there been a time in which the role of the CIO and other digital technology leaders has been so pivotal to shaping the future of their organisation. As the pandemic shuts down the physical world, everyone is assuming that the digital world will step in and fill the chasm. But is that realistic?

"Because technology has changed the way every industry operates, the decisions tech companies make today can help companies from every industry recover and thrive. - Deloitte, COVID-19 outlook for the US technology industry"

Supply chain recovery

Jim Kilpatrick, Global Supply Chain Leader, identifies the challenges of supply chain recovery, and proposes ways to address them.

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