Today supply chain disruption continues to strike every aspect of our day to day existence and can feel entirely palpable across both our corporate and personal lives. 

Despite this, disruption is not a new phenomenon. The troubling upward curve of disruption has existed for years and has been well documented. In 2019 McKinsey forecasted that in as little as a decade, companies could well experience losing as much as half their annual EBITDA to global disruption.

So the financial impacts to companies are indeed extensive, often incurred through sub-optimal contingency and mitigation – in an effort to remain competitive and in some cases to keep trade ticking along. 

Disruption can take many forms. Take for example the toilet roll shortage during the pandemic, which really shows the varying nature of challenges that can and do occur, point in case the ensuing surge in panic-buying leading to desperate shortages and bare supermarket shelves. Or the more recent and in-fact ongoing example of the chip shortage. The global semiconductor shortage is currently forcing the dialling down of production at several automotive manufacturers as well as causing heavily protracted lead times across a range of electrical consumer goods. 

But whilst we are certainly not strangers to supply chain disruption, something disturbingly new and uncharted is happening. The patterns of the past are not being repeated. The level and magnitude of disruption has increased, and it’s seemingly all happening at once, that’s all new. The procurement & supply chain global communities have of late become increasingly familiar with the term Black Swan Event, a term that originated in the finance sector. These are events that are unexpected and unknowable. Whereas a Grey Swan is an event that is possible and known, also potentially extremely significant, whilst like its cousin still very unlikely to occur. The difference being that Grey Swans can also be predictable. As these seismic events become increasingly commonplace – perhaps even predicable, actionable insights and supplier collaboration is now widely viewed as being on the critical path for procurement and supply chain professionals. A cross industry view demonstrated by a recent Ivalua survey showed that 66% of businesses now believe that collaboration with suppliers is needed to increase supply chain resilience.

Suppeco is one such collaborative supply chain technology, created on the basis that functional relationships through meaningful collaboration deep into supply chain are at the heart of all initiatives. The platform provides a dynamically structured framework that nurtures trust through reciprocal end-to-end access designed to enable real-time granular and actionable visibility and transparency – a systemic but dynamic approach to repeatable and scalable collaboration. 

Suppeco leverages the potential in relationships to solve key challenges facing the customer-supplier ecosystem.

4 Pillars Dynamic Infrastructure:

Configurable infrastructures for every customer-supplier relationship, in areas such as operational levels that lacked measurability, now structured to support live visibility and 24/7/365 operational management and improvement as well as real time social audit compliance.

Actionables:

Actionable visibility from tier 1 deep into supply chain supports live assessments, continuous improvements, corrective measures and 3rd party independent audit.

Insights:

Leverage the power of data deep into the operational footprint. Data is a vital part of maintaining standards, but data ages fast. We deliver live interactive measurable insights.

Omni:

We’ve created an unrivalled frictionless environment for collaboration at scale across distributed multi-party teams, layers, & companies.

Turbulent times call for disruptive SRM 

The last 3 years has seen a seismic shift towards a more collaborative, digitally transformed aspirational landscape. Answers to many of the current challenges lay within resilience enhancing digitisation – collaborative, realtime, actionable insights. There can be no doubting this, and the shift is accelerating. Tools are increasingly being designed to enable immersive, integrated consortia-based ecosystems. In future, it will simply not be possible to trade efficiently without taking the correct evolutionary steps – modern contracts, modern attitude, modern tech – for landscapes normalised in turbulence. Organisations that fail to evolve will struggle.

Find out more. Talk to our team about how Suppeco can help your organisation.