How to increase supply chain resilience in 2024

The challenge of large-scale change

The world in which supply chains of today operate is more uncertain than ever before. This past year, we’ve seen international conflict, record high temperatures, countless strike actions and cyber attacks, and more. The list seems endless and it shows no signs of stopping as we head into 2024.

These unforeseen events have consequences: supply chain disruptions. Whether or not your supply chain is directly impacted by these events, its critical KPIs will no doubt be disrupted by the delays, port congestions, resource shortages and increased costs that these events catalyse.

Here are some considerations you need to start making to achieve supply chain resilience in 2024.

Introducing redundancy

Introducing redundancy, or having a ‘Plan B, C and D’, is a great way to ensure that your supply chain won’t come to a halt when disruptions strike. For many years, supply chains tended towards lean operations. However, without having enough redundancy to withstand disruptions, supply chains can completely collapse, like Made.com back in 2022.

Whether the redundancy is additional suppliers, logistic networks or routes to market, reducing your supply chain’s dependency on individual components will ultimately make it stronger.

Expect the unexpected

Adjusting your expectations is one of the first steps you must take in order to drive supply chain resilience. Disruptive events are the new normal for supply chains, so a new approach is necessary. You have to be open to change. By taking account of prediction errors as part of your planning process, your plans will still be operable when the unforeseen occurs, reducing your sensitivity to error and driving resilience.

Adopting an antifragile mindset will help supply chain leaders ensure that their operations not only survive disruptions, but thrive from them.

Shifting away from spreadsheets

Spreadsheets and other manual processes underpin many of the world’s largest supply chains. Many of our clients come to us for digital solutions that will help them move away from outdated, inefficient and error-prone manual processes. 

It can be hard to move away from these processes as they are often operationally deep rooted, but driving change for supply chain management makes it easier to adopt a more probabilistic and strategic approach to planning.

Adopting a probabilistic approach to planning

Traditional planning tools work with set rules and deliver plans based on single scenarios. These plans leave little room for error so, when unforeseen events occur, the plans are no longer executable and KPIs face severe damage. You need to be able to choose from a range of plans that take uncertainty into account and give you insight into the impact of errors, rather than building plans that are like houses of cards and undermine your entire network structure.

By adopting a planning space that focuses not on a sole scenario, but rather multiple acceptable scenarios, you will be able to make better trade offs from a range of probabilistic plans. This will give you competitive advantage over more fragile supply chains with deterministic plans that cannot withstand disruption.

Choosing the right technology partner

In order to make any major supply chain change, you need to choose the right technology that will not jeopardise the smooth running of your operations and will enable you to see change quickly.

Our strategic planning tools are making the world’s most complex supply chains more resilient, sustainable and efficient. With quick time to value and designed to complement your existing technology, our tools have been key to driving transformative resilience and efficiency for companies like Brambles’ CHEP, AkzoNobel, Schneider Electric, Saint-Gobain and others.

If resilience is a priority for your supply chain in 2024, and you want to gain a strategic high level overview of your supply chain that accounts for prediction errors, our technology can help you.

Interested in finding out more? Register your interest below and a member of our team will be in touch with you shortly.