COVID-19 has severely revealed the vulnerability of global supply chains. An already complex global sourcing supply chain was scrambled as the world witnessed a pandemic storm in the year 2020. The pandemic outbreak created a tough space for every human being on this planet, severely affecting the supply chain managers across the world. The outbreak has created an emergency situation where supply chain operators are forced to drive innovation and adopt to assess temporary as well as permanent measures to check what could be more productive and also to check if they really need to morph into something new.
Apart from every other situation, what is more important for global sourcing professionals to understand is how to deal with the new norm when people reach at the end of the tunnel and get exposed to the open sky. Although people will find them in a vaguely familiar position after dealing with the storm for over a year, still the situation will be distinctly different from what it was a year back. And if you focus on the supply chain matters, you will find it rattled by the post pandemic effects. The first few months have been really difficult after the government had imposed a flurry of restrictive measures and then the contracting economy and plummeting demands ripped apart the supply chain across the globe. The result was pathetic and it affected the supply chain markets for health care and medical goods where demands exploded and buyers became frustrated as they were unable to deliver as per the demand.
The once reliable supply chain was suddenly failing to deliver sufficient medical goods. But with the advancement in technologies and the best country sourcing intelligent brains could successfully figure out a rescue operation. They could successfully reopen and recover the economy, once again allowing people to rely on the once reliable supply chain.
Even after the supply chain’s fragility was exposed and economy devastated in China and the US, a complex, yet smarter global supply chain utilized digitization methods and diverse sourcing opportunities to ensure a lasting economy. This reshaped the future of supply chain operations. Many organizations are digitizing their methods to improve supplier and buyer relationship, and secondarily trying to shift from a predominant paper-based system to an automated query solving system. Supplier disruption is a basic problem faced by most organizations and trying to solve these issues by recruiting reliable suppliers through automated processes can be a better alternative to recruiting suppliers without knowing much about them.
The current disruptive situation expects supply chain to reset the entire system and adopt to a new or temporary, yet more productive system. Structuring a nimble and smart supply chain can help organizations cope with the difficulties of the new normal and deliver results to customers, while maintaining their own profit margin. This way the best country sourcing can effectively build a global investment and trade network to weather the future storm. They can also mitigate the risks associated with single sourcing methods.
Sourcing Instinct 