Digital transformation has been waiting for its most compelling justification…

7 years of transformation in the space of 2 months? That was extraordinary.

But why is a crisis the best time to explore opportunity?

There’s no better way than a crisis to expose existing weaknesses, as well as highlighting new challenges and requirements. Let’s face it, we’ve all just spent the last 3 years coming down hard on supply chain. Too rigid, too slow, precarious, poor visibility, socially & environmentally irresponsible, anything but collaborative etc.

Fair to say, Covid exposed many old and enduring weaknesses within supply chain. And as the situation worsened, market analysts from the likes of Gartner, McKinsey, and every firm in-between, predicted that company procurement and supply chain professionals would be increasingly seeking to invest in relationship driven resilience to safeguard the future of their operations.

Although we can show that SCM tech has been around for several years, whilst supply chain business models have themselves not really changed for about 30 years; these two separate observations are by no means mutually exclusive and are in fact intrinsically linked.

For 2 decades leading up-to Covid, Supply chain operations were largely seen as cost centres. Thus, technology investments were not the priority, where instead the emphasis would be focusing on the numbers to keep costs down.

A technology landscape in any business sector broadly shapes itself around a market trend, challenge, or requirement. That’s precisely how product market fit works. The supply chain sector is no different. This explains why the procurement and supply chain tech landscape is bristling with S2P SaaS. It’s answered the challenge posed by a traditionally rigid numbers driven market.

But as we’ve demonstrated, trends change, paradigm shifts happen, often slowly, but sometimes ushered in more swiftly through rapid changes in market direction, brought on by for example a pandemic, or perhaps by other seismic global influences.

Digital transformation is affecting pretty much everything right now. Companies are being forced to adapt. Read here how trends, digital transformation, and the SaaS market work together.

Technology markets can be fickle. But this is not a fad. Make no mistake, we are now entering the golden age of digital transformation within the supply chain technology sector – driven by a metamorphic shift in business attitude & behaviours. And it’s happening in front of our eyes.

The question currently is: what’s your company doing to embrace the opportunity to explore digital transformation?