In this episode of Rethinking Supply Chain, Venzee CEO, John Abrams, hosts Scott Luton, Founder & CEO at Supply Chain Now, to follow up on their previous discussion regarding supply chain resilience.
In their last discussion, Scott talked about supply chain fragility, which led John to muse over the importance of flexibility and resilience in supply chain. Flexibility is the key to remaining salient in the face of crisis. However, given today’s environment, flexibility isn’t enough. It needs to be fast, intelligent flexibility. The good news is that digitization is already making this a reality for many organizations.
John and Scott then get into the details of end-to-end supply chain visibility. Today, there is no way to provide product data directly to the consumer, and the only way to make that possible is to make the entire supply chain digital. Scott gives some insight into the intersection of artificial intelligence and supply chain visibility and how technologies like sensors and blockchain are improving visibility.
The pandemic has proven to be an opportunity for supply chain management industry players to ask why there were failures. While they don’t necessarily need to plan for the next pandemic, we need to plan to make the supply chain itself more resilient. John and Scott remain optimistic that the supply chain will improve due to the lessons learned from a global difficult situation.