We recently welcomed Phil Pettit to our team as our new Client Services Director. With over 25 years of experience in supply chain, operations and engineering at some of the world’s biggest industrial manufacturing companies, including Cummins and Caterpillar, Phil brings with him a wealth of supply chain knowledge and expertise.
Read on to hear from Phil about his experience and the unique perspectives he brings to Hack and Craft.
Leading Globally Complex Supply Chains
Over the course of my career, I have led regional and global supply chain teams and functions. Consequently, I have experienced first hand the critical role that supply chains play in delivering customer success, and the impact catastrophic, or localised, supply chain failure can have on both customer and business performance.
In this blog post, I aim to share some of the key challenges I have encountered that are indicative of the complexities faced by supply chain organisations today. By understanding these challenges and embracing forward-thinking solutions, leaders can not only future-proof their networks but also drive competitive advantage in an unpredictable, ever-evolving market landscape.
Challenges Faced by Complex Supply Chains
- Effective Problem Solving: Supply chain organisations need the ability to solve intractable, complex problems with urgency and with priority given to mitigating customer impact. Ensuring that the impact is contained and recurrence is prevented is crucial in sustaining business performance and customer confidence.
- End-to-End Process and System Design and Integration: The evolution of more sophisticated, highly integrated ecosystems requires businesses to look differently at the design and operation of their processes and the effectiveness of their operating model.
- Data-Based Decision Making: Resilient supply chains need accurate, relevant data to ensure the quality of decisions, development of assumptions and verification of pre and post change performance. The challenge can be compounded by the absence of leading, proactive measures of performance.
- Change Management: Change is a constant. The ability to effectively implement and sustain change, driven by a compelling need and founded on continuous education, communication, and reinforcement of benefits and performance is essential.
- Risk Management: Accurate identification, assessment, and effective management of risk are all crucial to enabling resilient and sustainable supply chain performance and customer confidence.
The Need for Resilience
I firmly believe that the ability to protect customers from noise in the supply chain, to prevent the occurrence of problems, and accurately predict risk occurrence and impact, are key attributes of a resilient, sustainable and efficient supply chain. Resilience can be defined as the ability to maintain performance to the customer regardless of operational challenges.
My experience, particularly over the last 5 years, has shown me that in today’s dynamic, fast-paced operating environment, resilience in supply chains is a fundamental requirement.
Delivering digital innovation for the world’s leading supply chains
My role at Hack and Craft is to develop and grow high value relationships with our clients by combining a deep understanding of both client needs and our capabilities, to ultimately deliver solutions that deliver resilience and sustainability.
We develop digital network simulation and scenario exploration tools which enable our clients to accurately, and proactively, assess the resilience of their networks. The ability to verify risk impact and mitigation actions in real time across complex supply chains is something that I know would have been a game changer during COVID-19 as businesses around the world struggled to maintain supply chain performance.
Managing uncertainty is a challenge that supply chains will continue to face. While they can handle relatively small, isolated incidents, the compound effect of these events continues to cause major disruption.
The increasing size and complexity of supply chain networks makes them harder to secure, monitor and sustain. The business case for supply chain digitisation is compelling and investing in this capability will enable organisations to future proof their operations, drive growth and sustain competitive advantage in what will continue to be an ever-evolving market landscape.
I am looking forward to building valued, collaborative working relationships with our current and future clients, enabling Hack and Craft’s capabilities to be leveraged for supply chain resilience and sustainability.
