A generation ago, we competed on the quality of our value chain – we partnered with a few key suppliers and went to market through one or two primary channels. By contrast, the pandemic taught us that tomorrow’s business model won’t look anything like the one we’ve grown accustomed to. It will involve more suppliers, technology, channels, and risk. It will be more agile, resilient, flexible, automated, transparent, and infinitely more complex. To lead in this new world, we’ll need to be much faster and more sophisticated in our systems to find multiple paths of least friction and most opportunity.
Future Focused Initiatives
Supply Chain Reinvention
Many organizations are thinking regionally by sourcing, assembling, and delivering from their own backyards. Some are finding success by bringing parts of their supply chain in-house. Now is the time to think longer-term about your supply network to reduce risk, ensure efficiency, and enable agility.
Omnichannel Strategy
How else and where else could you be selling your products? Developing, testing, and iterating a channel strategy is especially important for legacy companies that have relied on one approach for bringing their products to market. Most business can’t afford to waste resources developing ineffective solutions. Having a clear strategy allows you to identify the greatest opportunities for your business.
Big Data Plan
Most companies are leaning into quantitative data to learn about what customers are doing but ignoring qualitative data to understand why they are doing it. Remember that behaviors (what people do) will always change more rapidly than needs (why people do it). Ultimately it isn’t a battle between the two. You’ll need a strategy for how often you analyze and refresh both.
