Do you recall all the supply chain drama of the COVID-19 shutdowns of March 2020 to December 2021? Remember the feverish discussions about a “new normal” that would come after?
Well, that new normal has turned out to feature three main trends: 1) continued market volatility based on the impact of energy and commodity cost inflation; 2) perpetual supply chain disruption, fueled by geopolitical instability and the current sanctions and prospective tariffs; and 3) further exposure to regulatory risk due to the proliferation of supply chain ESG and carbon equalization tariff regulations. This is all a lot for any organization to manage.
But savvy enterprises are discovering a new solution: collaborative supply networks, which can synchronize adaptive planning and execution across multiple enterprises contending with instability. Let’s take a look at some of the background that led to collaborative supply networks as well as some of the benefits that we’re seeing.
Extending Sales And Operations Planning And Execution
Consumer-packaged goods firms (CPGs) blazed a trail with enterprisewide sales and operations planning (S&OP). CPGs by their nature are familiar with wildly fluctuating demand and periodic supply bottlenecks. They invested in S&OP to align their sales channels, marketing, and financial planning, along with sales and operations execution (S&OE) to boost customer service and smooth the load on production and transportation capacity.
From there, other industries took it a step further to extend S&OP processes to customers, sales channels, and suppliers. These industries realized that their topdown supply chains were too brittle to weather the types of crises they were facing. They adopted resilient collaborative supply networks to extend S&OP discipline to their suppliers and customer or channel partners, as we described in this blog.
Collaborative Supply Networks Scale Multi-Enterprise Responses To Volatility
Three years into this “new normal,” an established market for collaborative supply networks exists to help enterprises achieve their resilience and sustainability goals, and we’ve developed a number of assets to help clients on this journey.
The recent Forrester Wave™ evaluation on the leading collaborative supply networks evaluates 13 notable platforms across 29 criteria. Our recent case study on Latexco describing best practices in integrating S&OP with S&OE and our recently published guide to supply chain transformation may help put this all into better context. We also have a supply chain benchmarking tool to help you understand the role of your supply chain in competing for customers and capital compared with your peers’ supply chain capabilities. Our maturity self-assessment helps pinpoint the specific supply chain processes that offer the most scope for improvement, and the supply chain ROI framework helps you establish the business case for supply chain technology investment.
We would love to help you with your supply chain transformation. If you are a Forrester client, feel free to schedule a guidance session through inquiry@forrester.com.
