Building supply chain resilience: What to do now and next during COVID-19

Building supply chain resilience: What to do now and next during COVID-19

In brief

  • Coronavirus COVID-19 is officially a pandemic presenting a very high risk to human life and economic well-being across the planet.
  • Supply chains are being disrupted on a global scale, creating a humanitarian and societal emergency.
  • A continuous cycle of risk mobilizing, sensing, analysis, configuration, and operation will help companies adapt supply chains and protect communities.
  • This approach will also build greater responsiveness and resilience into supply chains to protect against future disruptions.
  • To do this, supply chains should be leveraging platforms that support applied analytics, artificial intelligence and machine learning, while also ensuring end-to-end transparency.

What’s the risk to supply chains?

With the virus spreading rapidly and several regions and economies in lockdown, the disruption to supply chains is already severe. The supply chain is critical to getting goods and services quickly, safely and securely to those at risk of infection or who are working at the frontline of the medical response. Business leaders must make rapid decisions, and take immediate actions to sustain business operations to serve their customers, clients and communities, as well as protect and support their workers.

98%

of Fortune 1000 companies are seeing supply chain disruptions from COVID-19.1

75%

of companies have had negative or strongly negative impacts on their businesses

53%

of companies plan to downgrade their growth outlooks (or have already done so)

What should you be doing now?

This is not a typical risk event. The scale of the impact eclipses anything most supply chain leaders will have anticipated. The speed of the escalation requires continuous end-to-end assessment, optimization and monitoring. Companies need to respond rapidly and confidently to shape and execute a short-term tactical plan that will mitigate the risks to human health and protect the functioning of global supply chains. In doing so, strong data and analytics capabilities are crucial in understanding complexity, anticipating potential disruption, and quickly developing a response.