Jaydon Dean 
Global supply chains include networks that strategically source, produce and distribute raw materials into market goods across borders, cultures and jurisdictions.
Long-distance supply chains were stretched to their limits during the COVID-19 pandemic, and are potentially more fragile to disruption than ever: patronising hand-wringing won’t put the genie back in the bottle. What’s needed now are active positions on best-practices global supply chain management.
Risk Management
The number of opportunities, or steps, in a product’s supply chain can create a virtual tsunami of possibilities for errors, especially if those steps are dispersed among countries. A company that buys raw goods in China, manufactures its product in India and sells it to North American customers is doing business on a global supply chain.
Companies can contain risks to a certain level, by creating mitigation strategies. Use Black-Scholes as suggested above.First come up with a hazard list: natural disasters, non-compliance or international breaches, supplier issues and swings in demand, which may constitute potential dangers to the firm.
To keep risks at bay, companies should try to diversify suppliers, duplicate critical steps, and prepare contingency plans in best case scenario when any disaster fell upon them. A tracking system for following financial data including net income, supplier financing costs, operative expenses and cash flow files should be designed so that eventual suppliers would not provide delay of delivery or quality of services that went downhill of being sloppy. Those who made decisions on behalf of the corporate needed to be consistently informed in the flow of current supply trend.
Investing in Technology
Software and data analytics allow firms to improve how they operate, to optimise how they make decisions, and to make supply chains more resistant to disruptions. Among other things, this means that companies can fulfil consumers’ demands around the globe as quickly as possible.
Investment counts; more than half the survey respondents who said they had upgraded their procurement systems said that they were also implementing systems for real-time inventory information and supplier data systems that broadcast real-time inventory changes.
When you have multiple data systems in place, with each creating silos that in turn limit visibility and complicate decision-making, an overhaul is needed. A 360-degree view of your supply chain is dependent upon detailed, secure data in a format that you can use at scale – pulling the most helpful data sets to improve efficiency and enable agility needs to be seen as an investment with long-term returns.
Building Strong Relationships
Typically composed of suppliers, manufacturers and customers spread all over the globe, supply chains are highly interdependent. Keeping a good relationship from one link to another, from one manufacturer to another, from a tier-one to a tier-two, is critical to allow each link to become proactive. This, in turn, would help identify risks earlier before they cascade and compromise service-level agreements (SLA), leading to dissatisfied customers and potential revenue loss.
Strong supplier relationships can also protect a company from its increasing cost of operations and sudden material shortages, and this takes open lines of communication, technology solutions and removing siloed processes to prevent information barriers.
The reality is that it is difficult to maintain good supplier relationships, especially when dealing with multiple international vendors, with potential language barriers and different time zones, as well as labour and environmental standards, which all increases the risk of impact to quality or compliance. Technology innovations can and should be leveraged to improve communications, to help manage data flows and put in performance measurements for vendors. And if you are still using spreadsheets, or older software that doesn’t show what is happening in operations and supply, that is not helping.
Embracing Agility
Global supply chains consist of all the activities involved in creating and bringing a product or service to market, from procurement of components to production to selling. The complexity of global supply chains makes life difficult for companies, which have to plan and coordinate carefully to avoid breakdowns and fulfil consumer demand.
Flexibility and adaptability is the most important of all the future global supply chain management as this constantly changeable globalised market brings in new challenges every day.The customers’ likes and dislikes change very often. It is difficult to know the customers’ values and need. So agility is one of the key factors to make any companies’ global supply chain management successful.
An agile strategy needs to address organisational structure, operational agility, technology leverage, engineering and resources, business relationships and partnerships, and performance management. Gathering insights from internal teams and other stakeholders is crucial in developing an agile roadmap; pilot programmes give an opportunity to identify blind spots before going into full implementation mode to reduce risk and maximise results.
