BY MICHAEL POWER
QUANTUM LEAP
THE BUSINESS WORLD’S MOVE TOWARDS TECHNOLOGY ADOPTION HASN’T LEFT SUPPLY CHAIN BEHIND Over the past year technology has crept into how businesses operate across many industries. Among other changes, the COVID-19 pandemic has pushed meetings and conferences online, accelerated e-commerce and given rise to work-from-home technology. The move towards digitization has not left out supply chain organizations. For example, McKinsey & Company’s recent McKinsey Global Survey found that companies have accelerated the digitization of their customer and supply chain interactions, as well as internal operations, by three to four years. The effects of technology adoption on the supply chain have already begun to be felt. The 2021 MHI annual industry report released during the ProMatDX trade show – held online in April – revealed that among over 1,000 manufacturing and supply chain leaders polled, 83 per cent said they believe that digital will become the predominant model within the next five years, while 22 per cent believe it’s already here. Pandemic aside, it’s easy to see why supply chain organizations would adopt technology. The com8 JUNE 2021
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petitive advantages of doing so can include better and faster planning solutions, an improved response rate and optimal growth, along with the reduction of revenue and margin leakage, says Sanjiv Gupta, CEO of OpsVeda, a software company. Gupta agrees that the pandemic has only sped up the process of technology adoption. Going forward, supply chain organizations will prioritize technologies including AI-powered self-learning systems, operational intelligence platforms, intelligent data platforms as well as data-led initiatives, he predicts.
Yet a barrier that companies face in adopting digital supply chain technologies is the multiyear commitment many of them require, Gupta adds. “Platform-centric IT initiatives could easily turn into the IT wild west. Data lakes could quickly become data swamps,” he says. “The right approach would be to focus on the customer. Focus on business imperatives. Create a dataled initiative that produces incremental benefits and funds itself.” FOCUS ON CHALLENGES Investing in digital technology allows companies to find efficiencies while
increasing agility, says Daniel Oh, vice-president, medium business segment at Sage Canada, a cloud technology company. When searching for benefits, Oh recommends looking at common business challenges that distributors face. For example, according to the company’s recent report, Forward Together, which looks at the pandemic’s impacts on SMEs, 81 per cent of distributors are dealing with global events, 75 per cent are dealing with supply chain disruptions and another 75 per cent face rising costs and margin erosion. Digitization can help organizations deal with cost reductions, improve data security, realize faster delivery, better customer service and experience, all of which improve efficiency and productivity. And while the report shows that 79 per cent of distributors have a digital transformation strategy, implementing the right technology into a Canadian organization can seem daunting. A perceived lack of expertise, knowledge or skill, as well as fear that costs will outstrip ROI, can hamper progress. But now is the best time to reassess digital initiatives, Oh notes. The pandemic has offered a glimpse at a future in which digital is central to most transactions, Oh says. This has forced many organizations further up the adoption curve, almost overnight. “We’re seeing a number of technologies that are emerging from this pandemic,” he says. “It’s creating some really unique advantages for Canadian companies specifically.” Robotic process automation and warehouse automation are among the technologies that are especially key to supply chain, Oh says. The Internet of Things, artificial intelligent machine learning and advanced data analytics are also becoming increasingly important. Among these technologies, Oh puts the cloud at the top of the list. There are several benefits to not only having all an organization’s technology remotely accessible, but the cloud is scalable and leverages the power of the internet to increase speed, SUPPLY PROFESSIONAL
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