Watch: Taking the Long View of Supply Chain Transformation

Disruption has delivered some hard lessons to companies and their global supply chains. But are they really learning from it? Bernard Tremblay, CEO of USA & Canada with Miebach, offers a view.

Years of disruption in supply chains have brought about an awareness of the need for a fundamental transformation of the discipline and how it relates to the larger organization, Tremblay says. The problem is that many companies continue to fall back on the old model of cost and service optimization, and the notion of supply chain as the sole function responsible for true transformation.

Leading companies understand that wholesale supply chain redesign is essential to obtaining a competitive edge, but that accomplishment involves much more, including technology evolution and the adoption of artificial intelligence, he says.

Too many companies get stuck “running in circles” because they fail to view their supply chains holistically, Tremblay says. What they should be doing is starting at the top of the organization and “drilling down” with a coherent strategy that extends through multiple layers of planning, tactics and execution. Trying to fix, say, a service-level problem from the bottom up makes it impossible to effect true transformational change. “You’re not just looking at what went wrong last month,” he says.

Tremblay’s message becomes even more urgent as external developments upend supply chain strategy. When it comes to enacting long-term transformation and redesign, “the time to execute changes gets shorter and shorter. You have to be much more agile.”

A company’s top supply chain professional, whether a vice president or chief supply chain officer, plays an important role in that transformation, but they can’t do it alone. Every part of the organization, including the CEO, sales and manufacturing, have to be aligned with the greater strategy. “It has to be enterprise-wide,” Tremblay says. “Where strategies break down is when there’s a failure of bringing everybody on board.”