The Three Truisms of Supply Chain: The three ‘Reciprocity’ focus areas for Enterprises to cope with uncertainty
Supply Chain professionals are very much in demand, especially after the recent epidemic of Covid-19. We really hope that this episode will also pass on after creating significant dents as well as popping-up with significant nascent supply chain methodologies. It is also the time to come up with some reasonably simple and basic SC truisms that might not be followed by many supply chain experts over-flooded with the acronyms of versatile global agencies.
The foremost is the ‘Reciprocal Relationship’ with the supplier and with employees. Most of the companies are still believing in the ‘deterrence based view’ and still believing to cope up with uncertainties of Covid-19. The trick to bridge this gap is not to think in isolation. Total cost calculations are still pertinent but not at the cost of your suppliers and employees. How can you think of winning at this crucial time by giving a loss to your supplier/employees? Win-Lose can never be the option for Supply Chain world.
The 2nd truism is the ‘Reciprocal Development’. If you cannot develop your employees and your supplier, that simply means, you are not ready to develop yourself. This is very much true in local context, where many small & medium enterprises still believe that supplier and employees will do wonders in this uncertain time while benefit of it will mainly be accrued by these enterprises. This is something even not ethical in Supply Chain. We used to say often; It’s impossible to govern supply chain with old rules. New thoughts, new developments, innovativeness and entrepreneurial mind-set is paramount for the companies to counter uncertainty.
It’s really astonishing to see the enterprises not able enough to predict correctly. Obviously our forecasting truism says that ’forecast is always wrong’. But excuse me, does that simply mean; we do not want to foresee. Well, this shouldn’t be the case. The last truism is ‘Ability to predict measures the power of stability’ and this is something known as ‘Reciprocal Power of Prediction’. Quite a challenging task? and believe me companies want to do it alone. I inferred, because, generally the enterprises are overly optimistic about their skill-set, without knowing that power of prediction is not concerned about the skill-set rather it is more about the mind-set. The strong and healthy mind-set of the enterprise, employees and suppliers.
The next time, when you formulate your performance measures, I hope reciprocity is something you will be engaged with, because the Rules of Engagement are changing now with more uncertainties.
