Post-COVID19, Supply Chain Management Strategy

As we hit the publish button for this blog, the Indian government has allowed staggered opening for the services of e-commerce majors, even for non-essential items, and there is a mail from Big Basket to all users, apologising for the disruption in service and announcing the extension of BB membership by an extra month!

Business, is limping back to normal and that’s a silver lining on the dark cloud that still hovers over the e-commerce players. The unforeseen COVID19 flare-up caught them unaware and unprepared, they all, without exception — Amazon, Flipkart, Gofers, and Big Basket — fell like nine pins on the board. With the announcement of 21-day lockdown, their supply chain lay tattered and they lost the last mile connectivity with their end consumers. No supply, no delivery boys, no sales and no consumers.

“The traditional view of a linear supply chain is transforming into digital supply networks (DSNs) where functional silos are broken down within your organization and you are still connected to your full supply network to enable end-to-end visibility, collaboration, responsiveness, agility, and optimization,” says a Deloitte study on COVID19-Managing Supply Chain Risk and Disruption.

Taking quick stock of what happened with the ecommerce major, the study goes on to recommend, a calibrated switch to digital supply networks (DSNs) to anticipate disruptions to future-proof their business and reconfigure themselves appropriately to mitigate their respective impacts.

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The following model from the Deloitte study explains it in clearer terms:

Who can help?

An expert website design and development agency can recommend ways of future proofing your business in terms of intelligent mapping of DSNs. Litmus Branding has expert website developers with many years of experience in various technologies on its team who can review and revamp our present-day ecommerce platform to match and respond to future demands.

Thankfully, technologies such as IoT, cloud computing, 5G, AI, 3D printing, and robotics are now easily available and deployable and would extensively be used in architecting DSNs into future ecommerce platforms.

“Whether it’s a black swan type event like COVID-19, a trade war, an act of war or terrorism, regulatory change, labour dispute, a spike in demand for a particular product in a specific region, or supplier bankruptcy, companies are learning to count on the unexpected,” says the study.

A digital marketing, website design and development agency like Litmus Branding can quickly prepare you in meeting their challenges.

Long-shot benefits

Although the re-building and making an economic recovery on the basis of the new DSNs, is going to take time — no less than a year or two, according to industry experts — eventually this change with benefit the market as the present-day model was far too skewed in favour of urban centre of consumption. This delivery model will now de-centralise.

Nisha Desai Biswal, the President of US India Business Council (USIBC) has observed in her media interactions that India will benefit as businesses will want to de-risk will now not have their supply chain concentrated in one area and will try to diversify and disperse to various markets, including rural market that is still untapped.

Without doubt, companies have an uphill task in order from this ‘viral overload,’ but the good news is that if e-commerce businesses are well-prepared, the next unforeseen crisis may not have the same impact.

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According to an Ernst & Young advisory, COVID-19: how to build supply chains resilient to disruption, a supply change revamp strategy must necessarily include:

An end-to-end supply chain risk assessment to prioritize critical focus areas. E-commerce platforms would do well if they proactively engage their supply chain stakeholders, such as suppliers and logistics service providers (LSP) in this risk health check.

· Change demand and inventory levels to fill in critical gaps in supply,

production capacity, warehousing and transportation.

· Efficiently identify and leverage additional networks among various

suppliers’ pool, production and distribution networks.

· Diversify their supplier pool

· Implement digital and automated capabilities on their platforms

· Re-evaluate their procurement policies for challenging circumstances

· Extensively deploy IoT (Internet of Things)tools on their ecommerce

portals to track goods movement and forecast demand from social, medial behavioural analytics and show agility in responding to change shifts.

To be sure, this de-risking strategy for your ecommerce platform cannot be implemented in a day or even in a few weeks. It may take a few months intensive review and rebuilding of your present web property and a graded implementation of the final plan, but the time to act on that plan is now.