The evolution of supply chain business models has been accelerated by unprecedented disruptions. As a result, there has been a clear shift from analog supply chains models of the past into a trajectory towards a digitalized ecosystem. These new business models recognize and necessitate the move to a digital and integrated supply chain that provides visibility and ease of use for consumers.

This journey is about moving towards a world where all parties participating across your network are connected to a single version of the truth. Supply chain thinking is shifting from ‘linear supply chains’ to ‘supply chain eco-systems’ propelled and supported by digital technologies.

Gartner has established a five-stage model of the journey to supply chain maturity, ranging from manual, analog systems to a fully digitalized ecosystem. Key differentiators along this evolutionary chain include consideration of data and collaboration, with the ultimate goal of integrating data across multiple systems to achieve a fully connected ecosystem that provides transparency and visibility for your company both internally and externally.

For supply chain professionals in your organization to receive the flexibility and agility they need to increase speed, drive down costs, and satisfy customers, there are four critical components your company must possess. These include real-time visibility, predictive insights, prescriptive decision support, and real-time collaborative execution, all of which can be achieved through the implementation of supply chain control tower.

Deploying a network model to achieve real-time, end-to-end visibility

Visibility is the foundation of every control tower capability, with all advanced decision making and responses within the execution window relying upon the quality and timeliness of visibility. Keeping order, shipment, and inventory status updated for all parties to see in real time is critical to success., but this often proves a core challenge for control towers, since highly dynamic supply chains can change at a rate of over 50 changes per second.

Restaurant and food services organizations have adapted their services in recent times by investing in cloud-based restaurant point of sale and its capacity to integrate across locations with emerging technology. A big trend within that has been in POS integrations with mobile and self-serve solutions that allow guests to manage their own orders. This is particularly pertinent in an era of social distancing. But even before that became central to how restaurant and food service organizations engage with guests, the modern restaurant guest sought out channels where they can manage the details of their orders themselves in favor of the traditional staff-operated POS terminal. That trend was driven by how culture and technology converged.

Self-directed ordering is particularly relevant now when minimizing contact is so important to feeling safe and secure when interacting with brands. The organizations that are winning right now are embracing that by giving up control over managing the details of an order and leaving it to those who know about those order details better than anyone – the guests themselves. What kinds of benefits does this trend represent for the restaurant and food service industries in this era of change? What does it mean for organizations ahead in the 2020s? Let’s take a look.

The fashion industry thrives on innovation. It’s what the consumer wants from us—something new, not just clones or replacements for worn-out items. New product introductions are critical to business success, but only half of them achieve the profit objectives set before launch. To improve the ratio of hits to disappointments, it is essential to listen to the consumer and collaborate with the supply chain.

The consumer sets the bar for value and the supply chain determines whether you meet or miss it. The next decade will call for significant materials and process innovations at both the micro (product) and the macro (enterprise, supply chain, and industry) level. If shorter, more frequent product introduction cycles were the only challenge… but they’re not. At strategic planning levels, the industry must figure out how to convert to more sustainable ways of doing business, starting with raw materials and research and development and expanding product lifecycle management practices to include recycling. At the operational level, rethink the way you work internally and collaborate with supply chain partners to eliminate waste throughout the value chain. If a process doesn’t add value for the consumer, don’t do it. Optimize the entire value chain and focus it on value creation. Innovations arise at every stage, when all the partners can see the value chain as a whole.

Our recent era has tested the restaurants and food services industries to be flexible, adaptive, and more aware that being able to anticipate what’s to come is a vital component for staying competitive in the present. It’s also taught the industry that that status quo and the legacy systems that prop up outdated assumptions work directly against those efforts. A movement towards digitalization that has been happening over the last few years and embraced by restaurant and foodservice industry leaders has helped businesses to build a solid foundation for success.

Cloud infrastructure, SaaS, and cloud technology for restaurants and food services deployed to all brand locations has helped organizations to address the seismic shift that the industry is facing right now. How has this technology done this? How do the challenges and successes of the present point the way to resilience in the future? Let’s take a look.

In a data-driven world, navigating the challenges of today’s supply chains requires an unprecedented level of agility. This calls for supply chain tools that deliver network-wide trading partner connectivity to enable real-time visibility, demand and supply planning, and production scheduling insights.

Fortunately, modern tools deployed in an organization’s technology stack can digitally transform the supply chain, revealing new opportunities for innovation across the entire network.

At the same time, automation and advanced analytics delivered in a digital environment can synchronize production and distribution activities to match demand.

B2B transaction data from the Infor Nexus network shows a major shift in supplier payment terms following the onset of COVID-19 in March of 2020. In the first three months of last year, the majority of payment terms were 30-45 days. In March, 66% of all orders were on terms less than 60 days.

By July, the buyer-supplier payment dynamic had completely flipped, with 65% of orders on terms greater than 60 days. This trend continued throughout the year with 60 day, 90 day, or even longer payment terms in place as buyers moved to preserve their own capital. As a result, many suppliers found themselves in need of a lifeline. For many buyers and suppliers, supply chain finance programs became that solution, removing risk and stress from supply chains by ensuring suppliers access to early payment.

The competitive landscape of the wholesale distribution industry is fiercer than ever before. With brand-new, internet-based distributors of all sizes seemingly popping up as quickly as mergers and acquisitions are building new distribution powerhouses, the competition just keeps getting more intense. Adding to the mix are an increasing number of manufacturing companies that are selling direct to retailers and offering online shopping options for consumers, bypassing distribution companies entirely. And let’s not forget the impact big box stores and e-tailers can have on the distribution channel as they leverage their purchasing power, large retail networks, and extensive B2C experience.

Of course, no discussion about distribution competition is complete without addressing the elephant in the room, Amazon® Business. With the ability to sell millions of SKUs with flexible shipping options at low price points, Amazon is setting a high bar for customer expectations. Amazon is very good at responding to how buyers buy today by offering a powerful customer experience that uses modern technologies, such as artificial intelligence (A.I.) and data science.

Rising costs, increasing complexity, growing customer demands, and expanding global supply chains are all intrinsically linked challenges that manufacturers and distributors face on a daily basis. Meanwhile, expanding omni-channel markets are forcing manufacturers and distributors to not only change how they sell to customers, but also redefine who their customers are. And customers are exerting even further
pressure with demands for customization and personalization of products.

Global expansion adds to the challenge of maintaining visibility into inventory, shipping, and tracking—often across borders, continents, and oceans. In addition to making sophisticated warehouse operations even more complex, this all makes it difficult for manufacturers and distributors to remain competitive, keep costs down, and maintain profitability. Ineffective order management, excessive labor costs, and inefficient asset use just exacerbate the problem. To tackle these challenges, manufacturers and distributors must reconsider how their warehouse management practices, processes, and systems need to change in order to improve warehouse productivity, visibility, and costs.

The International Finance Corporation (IFC), the World Bank’s private sector arm, set out to provide relief to businesses in emerging regions as the 2020 pandemic roiled global markets. Stephanie von Friedeburg, MD and COO of the IFC, looks back on the year in a recent podcast where she reflects the following:

“There's been a substantive hit on supply chains, trade shocks. And so our trade finance business, which has always been a core of our business, has grown very substantially. And we've seen it in the poorest countries in particular, where we know that we need to continue to keep trade flowing. So we've seen an increase in trade finance in that relief piece. We've also seen many of our existing clients needing working capital and needing liquidity, and we believe it was important for us when we typically don't do a lot of liquidity or working capital, but important for us to step in and help our existing clients to withstand the crisis, keep them solvent so that when we come out of the crisis, we can rebuild faster and better.”