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The covid-19 pandemic’s onset brought global supply chains’ fragilities into sharp focus and magnified the need for organisations to build resilience and agility into their systems.

While the world might be gradually recovering from the Covid backset and bouncing back to normalcy, the truth is that there may not be a ‘stable state’ for global trade in the years to come. So, the best way forward is to be equipped with the right strategies and tools to face the unexpected.

Here are five strategies to help your organisation build a more resilient, agile supply chain and overcome unforeseen obstacles:

No problem’s tall with supply chain agility and resilience

There is a fine line between disruptions and opportunities, and you can cross it with supply chain resilience and agility. It’s no surprise that companies are heavily investing in improving adaptability, efficiency, minimising risks and building sustainability instead of focusing solely on cost savings.

Especially after the covid-19 episode, companies are proactively turning towards flexible sourcing and distribution strategies. Manufacturers are even considering localising sourcing to build more resilience into their systems. This shifting pattern to suppliers closer to manufacturing facilities is expected to gain more traction in the time ahead.

For your organisations to thrive amid uncertainty, it’s crucial to realign your goals and adopt a lean-approach. Ensuring integration in end-to-end supply chain management can help offer newer solutions to unforeseen challenges.

It’s vital to note that emerging technologies will have a pivotal role in the journey towards process resilience and agility. New-age technologies such as Freight Management Systems can enable you to connect parties across your supply chain network, ensure accuracy via automation and drive cost savings in the process.

Your ability to innovate and scale up determines how well you will thrive

When a global disruption hits your business, how well you ride through the crisis is determined by your ability to innovate and adapt to the circumstances. For instance, when covid-19 impacted businesses worldwide, we witnessed manufacturers shift to producing PPE kits, ventilators, and turning their existing products into things that would help mitigate the Covid crisis in record time.

Another way businesses’ adaptability surfaced was how quickly most of the companies went online overnight.

When you have excellent visibility over your entire supply chain, accelerating innovation and finding opportunities amid disruption becomes easy. Today cloud-based freight management systems are helping companies innovate faster by enhancing various capabilities.

These platforms have helped many businesses seamlessly adapt to remote working and stay afloat via access to instant actionable insights based on real-time data analytics.

Visibility and trust is the key to new opportunities

A significant aspect of ensuring that your business is evolving to keep up with time is to have end-to-end visibility over your supply chain. This implies all the stakeholders should be able to quickly access all the information and insights required to make sound decisions.

You can achieve multi-tiered visibility by adopting a unified dashboard for managing all functions of your supply chain. It can build confidence in your decision making and ensure operational transparency.

Innovative solutions such as GoComet’s shipment tracking system take visibility a step further and allow you to track your international shipments’ movement on a unified dashboard. Moreover, it will enable you to share tracking data with your customers for their particular order and enhance the customer experience.

Plan to execute and never give up

You can do all the planning in the world, but without executing those plans well, everything will be in vain. In the fast-moving supply chain industry, aligning plans with your ability to execute them, and customer demand is crucial.

Efficient planning calls for a sound understanding of the market conditions, futuristic thinking and a collaborative approach. With present-day freight management software platforms simplifying big data analytics, companies can now benefit from prescriptive and predictive analytics insights. It’s best to use these insights to plan ahead of time and win despite disruptive events.

Besides, technologies such as machine learning and artificial intelligence have further equipped companies to foresee future uncertainties and tackle them more effectively.

Survive and thrive with sustainability

Supply chains, by design, have social and environmental consequences. Right from the waste generated by your facility while manufacturing goods to the air and water pollution involved in getting your goods from one place to another, supply chains adversely affect the environment in several ways.

Disruptive events are a reminder to all of us that sustainability matters. Adopting sustainable practices has become more relevant than ever before today, as we are faced with unprecedented challenges. It’s crucial that you prioritize taking positive steps in this direction.

You can invest in incorporating sustainability into your supply chain and allow it to guide your decisions. Where there is a will, a robust bottom line and sustainability can, and do coexist!

Lastly: Learn, Evolve and Flourish

It is the turbulent times that make way for new growth. So, the key is to learn, unlearn and relearn every time a crisis hits your business and operate with strategies that best suit the need of the hour.

If you’re looking to build supply chain resilience and agility with the help of technological solutions, reach out to us here to find out how GoComet can help you.