Résilience de la chaîne d'approvisionnement dans une ère post-covid 19

What is Supply Chain Resilience?

Supply chain resilience refers to a supply chain's ability to be prepared for unexpected risk events. If you have a resilient supply chain, you can manage to respond and recover quickly to these disruptions by returning to the original situation or by moving to a new, more desirable state in order to increase customer service, market share and financial performance.

Impact of COVID-19 Pandemic on Supply Chain Management

Since the onset of the global pandemic, the world faces a unique, complex challenge that is disrupting lives, livelihoods and societies. From a business perspective, companies that can remain resilient during these tough times, can also emerge stronger. As supply chains struggle with new demand patterns, supply constraints, and logistical challenges, many lessons can be learned from the impact of the pandemic, to kickstart transformation and build resilience.

Though supply chains have continued to adapt and improve since the start of the global pandemic, challenges remain that will require practically all companies to abandon prior “best practices” and focus on the kind of transformation that our new environment demands. Organizations are learning that we must build in the flexibility and additional capabilities to not only manage the ebb and flow of today’s crisis, but also to prepare for a sustainable future. Coming out of this crisis, the strongest companies will have implemented state-of-the-art supply chain management practices powerful enough to mitigate a broad array of risks and perform under any market conditions.

Emerging Opportunities For Supply Chains

Traditionally, supply chains have focused on ways to mitigate a narrow set of predictable risks without considering the full picture and the fact that many other things can go wrong. The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has laid bare these fundamental weaknesses, but it is also inspiring supply chain executives to reimagine and implement processes that can fix past problems and position their organizations to operate smoothly in the future. The biggest trend we are seeing is a drive to ultimately develop end-to-end digital capabilities that can infuse resilience and comprehensive risk management into every aspect of the supply chain. Artificial intelligence, machine learning, robots and advanced analytics are key tools for achieving this. It is critical, however, for every organization to understand how these technologies can optimize their specific operations in order to deploy them intelligently across the supply chain."

How does Bureau-Veritas’ Supply-R help businesses to meet the challenges of the new reality?
 

For almost 200 years, the very nature of Bureau Veritas’ mission has been to support its clients in managing risks and improving performance, helping them to meet quality, safety, health and sustainability requirements.

To support its clients in gaining deeper insights into the status quo in order to strategically and effectively plan and ultimately achieve a more resilient, ethical and sustainable set of practices, in July 2020 Bureau Veritas launched Supply-R, a unique solution that delivers a comprehensive and customized risk assessment of a businesses’ supply chain, based on field data collected and independent on-site verification of critical suppliers. Through initial audits of it’s clients’ supply chain practices, Bureau Veritas collects data on the digital platform to determine a “resiliency score” and identifies the interventions needed to close gaps and improve the supply chain.

The Supply-R solution is flexible and agile, enabling it to efficiently meet the specific needs of different clients across various business sectors. It offers a customizable modular structure that addresses critical elements for a resilient supply chain, such as business continuity, technical capabilities, HSE, data integrity & information security and logistic & inventory practices.

Supply-R isn’t about evaluating each supplier individually, but rather taking a step back to holistically examine and evaluate the complexities of the entire supply chain. Clients can use this information to ultimately develop the right transformation plan, making sure their new supply chain processes are equipped with the most relevant technologies and can respond quickly to the evolution of any future business environment. By taking advantage of this solution, businesses are choosing to make their supply chains strong, transparent and flexible.

Balancing Optimisation With Ethical And Sustainable Practices?

Organizations are coming to terms with the fact that their operations cannot simply be about just optimization or just ethical and sustainable practices - they have to be both. Getting to this ideal state requires commitment from all fronts within an organization. It requires a detailed approach to not only optimize the traditional functions of a supply chain, but to make sure that ethical practices and sustainability are built in from every angle. This means organizations will need to recognize - and expect - that the new status quo will likely look very different, and must go far beyond simply meeting the goals of the bottom line. If we have learned anything from this pandemic, it is that building a resilient, agile and sustainable supply chain is a prerequisite for future success.