Gunjan Bassi
Gunjan Bassi (Research Manager)

The supply chain is undergoing a series of seismic shifts. There are shortages everywhere, and their root causes are varied. In some cases, it is historical capacity unable to keep up with demand growth; in other, it is supply disruptions from a lack of workers or shipping containers.

Sustainability and sustainable operations have re-emerged as a critical set of capabilities for this highly disruptive new/next normal.

To meet their business goals, manufacturers must not only be able to quickly adapt to disruption but also to capitalise on the changed circumstances. They should be able to adopt new business models in which opportunity presents itself.

This requires a resilient supply chain that can see and analyse what is happening in real time, and then act quickly on the resulting insights. IDC’s 2022 Global Supply Chain Survey results also show that improving supply chain visibility and agility are the top two areas of focus for European organisations to mitigate risk in their supply chains.

 

IDC’s Digital Supply Chain Resiliency Maturity Benchmark

IDC Maturity Scape: Digital Supply Chain Resiliency provides senior leaders with a framework to assess their digital supply chain resiliency and define a path for improving business performance in the face of increasingly frequent supply chain disruptions.

Below is a graphical representation of the five stages of supply chain resiliency maturity as defined by IDC — ranging from the simplest, unstructured ad hoc stage to the advanced, systemised and optimised stage.

Source: IDC, 2022

 

European Manufacturers’ Maturity Distribution Across the Stages

According to IDC’s Supply Chain Resiliency MaturityScape Benchmark Survey, 2022, with 200 European respondents, we found that European manufacturers across all industries are at various stages of their digital supply chain resiliency journey.

One that will affect how products are designed and brought to market, what their supply chain planning and execution process entails, how products are manufactured and fulfilled, and what their level of engagement is with customers and consumers.

Key findings of this benchmark study include:

  • Only 4.1% of supply chains are at the highest levels of digital supply chain resiliency maturity, indicating that there is still significant progress to be made and value to be realised using modern processes and digital technologies.
  • Less than a fifth of all supply chains are in the top 2 stages of maturity, offering a competitive advantage, particularly in times of major disruption.
  • Conversely, nearly half of the respondent organisations are at the lowest two stages of maturity, with supply chains that are either competitively neutral or a source of competitive disadvantage.

 

Supply Chain Resiliency is a Long Journey

Building digital supply chain resiliency is a longer-term journey that must progress through the maturity stages from the simplest, unstructured ad hoc stage to the advanced, systemised optimised stage.

This journey represents a significant transformation for many companies and leadership teams and will vary for different companies based on the subindustry in which they compete and their prior efforts to transform the supply chain.

There seems little question that manufacturers now compete in a fast-paced, disruptive, information-intensive world in which both successes and failures exist with complete transparency.

In this context, the old ways of working simply aren’t going to be sufficient. The past two years have not been easy for the supply chain, and 2022 does not appear to be poised to reverse that trend.

Having the right vision, leadership, and culture in place is critical for the success of any endeavour, and supply chain resiliency is no exception.

Operating in an environment where finding labour and talent is a major challenge means understanding how better to train the people you can find and how to effectively use technology to augment the routine or rote tasks that can distract them from more value-added tasks.

Sustainability overarches all these things and must evolve from a “program” to the way we run the supply chain. Sustainability should be integrated into the tactical and operational supply chain processes, with metrics reporting that determines the impact and provides continuous improvement.

 

Reach out to me Gunjan Bassi at gbassi@idc.com to learn more about this IDC MaturityScape Benchmark. You can also read our report titled IDC MaturityScape Benchmark: Digital Supply Chain Resiliency in Europe, 2022 (subscription required).

Resiliency is also one of the pillars of IDC Insights’ PRIME Framework and will be covered during the IDC Manufacturing Summit 2022. Join us to learn more. Registrations are now open.

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