Supply Chains Are Witnessing Their Own Polycrisis. What Can You Do About It?

Polycrisis. That’s the latest buzzword to come out of the World Economic Forum (WEF) annual meeting in Davos this year, after first being popularized last year by economic historian Adam Tooze. 

The ubiquity of the word this year at Davos denotes the unique combination of shocks that supply chains are currently dealing with: the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, climate change, the war in Ukraine, widespread inflation and more. 

With the end of the 2023 WEF meeting, it’s a good time to think of the takeaways. 

For global companies, the question is how to build resilient supply chains and navigate the polycrisis currently disrupting operations?

Since early 2020, many organizations followed the same general pattern in developing resilience:

• In 2020, as the pandemic forced shutdowns and sudden widespread shocks, most companies formed task forces to fire-fight situations as they occurred.
• In 2021, as companies realized that their task forces were becoming permanent, they started aiming for slightly longer-term supply chain resilience in order to come out of fire-fighting mode.
• In 2022, long-term supply chain resilience became a goal for supply chains and became top of mind for management, even ahead of the traditional front-runner of cost reduction. 

However, the notion of resilience was still hazy, with companies exploring vastly different solutions to improve resilience. Regionalization, nearshoring and reshoring are some of the steps companies have taken to avoid disruptions resulting from having operations concentrated in one geographical area. 

• In 2023, resilience has resolved itself into four key enablers – organizational alignment, visibility, agility and collaboration. 

Next-generation supply chain software is helping companies achieve resilience by aligning people and processes, providing real-time visibility into supply chain operations, enabling more rapid responses to disruptions through AI-driven analytics and driving tighter, more efficient collaboration between departments, business units and multitier suppliers and partners. 

To equip their supply chains to survive a polycrisis environment, leadership must focus on these four key enablers shown above. 

Alignment, visibility, agility and collaboration together create a strong foundation to not just survive, but to turn the supply chain into a competitive advantage in today’s uncertain environment. 

With a resilient supply chain as a differentiator, companies can thrive in the middle of the current polycrisis and capitalize on competitors’ failures to gain market share. 

Making supply chains more resilient will help companies weather current and future crises, as well as make them more sustainable in the long run. 

In the post-pandemic new normal, enterprises need to leverage next-generation platforms and AI to implement the four key enablers of resilience. 

By doing so, they can orchestrate value chains with greater efficiency, navigate the current polycrisis and start to fulfill the goals laid out at Davos.