A recent article on protecting your supply chain against disruption had some very good ideas for protecting your supply chain against disruption, but all were useless without visibility as most of them could not be carried out effectively without visibility. How critical is good visibility? Let’s review the suggestions.
Perform a supply chain vulnerability audit.
How can you assess vulnerability without a good supply chain map? Without visibility, how can you see beyond the first tier to find sole-source arrangements in the sub-tiers that are putting your entire supply chain at risk.
Do a rigorous “what-if” analysis.
If you don’t have a good map, you can’t analyze what would happen if you changed a supplier, changed a distribution lane, shifted production, etc.
Implement a strategic supply chain plan.
How can you judge the value of the plan if you can’t fully analyze the effects of its implementation and the chances of the mitigations it contains succeeding in the effect of a disruption? And, as per above, you need visibility for a full and proper analysis.
Create a balance between supply chain network efficiency and operations resilience.
The only way to determine if a plan is balanced is to do extensive what-if analyses that consider various perturbations of, and disruptions to, the normal scenario and see if the chain remains operational. These models can only be built with extensive visibility.
Design long-term strategies.
This also requires significant what-if analysis and detailed supply chain data, which in turn requires extensive supply chain visibility.
However, if you have good supply chain visibility, you can do all of this, and more, and truly secure your supply chain against significant disruption. And then you will have resiliency too. To find out more about the ROI of Supply Chain Resiliency, download the SI Illumination, sponsored by Resilinc.