Use Gartner’s Supply Chain Strategy Predicts to Help You Keep Your Supply Chain New Year’s Resolutions

Use Gartner’s Supply Chain Strategy Predicts to Help You Keep Your Supply Chain New Year’s Resolutions -https://ift.tt/3tWonEo –

Have You Made a Personal Resolution For 2022?
If so, then the day I write this is a crunch day for you. A huge study from the sports tracking app Strava labelled Jan. 19 “Quitters Day” and predicted that most people who make resolutions would abandon them on that day.  As a triathlon coach in my spare time, I encourage my triathletes to target an “A race” to give them a big goal to focus on, but we don’t just have “outcome resolutions” but “process resolutions” that are phased through the year.

What about your company’s supply chain resolutions?
Companies make resolutions too. We’ve seen many publicly committing to Net Zero for example. But like New Year’s resolutions, these commitments will likely not be kept if employees do not understand what they need to do differently. Contextualizing the strategy within the scope of company values is crucial for behavior change. Companies and supply chains need both outcome and process goals too.

Gartner’s latest Predicts 2022: Supply Chain Strategy delivers you the five most compelling new predictions for supply chain strategy to use as the basis for your planning. These include two “outcome” predictions that warn of the perils of the say/do gap if big organizational commitments on sustainability and DEI are not operationalized by supply chain leaders. We also selected three “process” predictions that give our view of how companies and their supply chains will compete in the future to help them deliver their resolutions.

While many companies have developed the know-how to deliver cost-optimized product supply and effective service delivery during times of normal operating conditions, we are far from those conditions today. The danger is that if all the focus is on today’s disruptions that leads to a cycle of under-preparation for tomorrow’s disruptions. Gartner’s predictions help you look up and out to areas of growing stakeholder concern, including sustainability and DEI, which are likely to drive future disruption and opportunity, and which are the focus of many organizations’ resolutions.

To deliver your outcome goals ask yourself: Do I have a clear target? The right metrics? A plan? Have I assessed the risk of disruptions and mitigated these? Our first two predicts look at metrics and the likelihood of keeping commitments.

“By 2024, 70% of global organizations will report metrics to track realization in supply chain against corporate diversity, equity and inclusion objectives.” Measuring your progress is key to know you are moving towards your commitments. It’s the sort of thing that turns resolutions into reality. Our Gartner/ASCM Supply Chain DEI Survey shows that only 42% of global companies currently have DEI objectives and report DEI metrics in their management scorecards, compared to 83% of the companies in Gartner’s Top 25. The leaders are pointing the way — measure what matters to close the say/do gap.

“By 2025, 90% of public sustainable packaging commitments won’t be met due to reliance on plastics and single-use packaging.” Why do we predict so many sustainable packaging commitments will be missed? Generally, enterprise commitments to sustainable packaging are based on assumptions around recyclability, reusability or compostable. The process goals are not being met today – with recycling infrastructure in many countries simply not developing fast enough. According to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation Global Commitment 2021 Progress Report, among the public signatories to these commitments, most remain far from reaching their goals. Some progress has been driven by increasing recycled content use, but there remains an over reliance on single-use packaging and future scenarios focused on collection, recycling and disposal alone have been shown to fall short, with high ocean leakage and GHG emissions.

Our three other predicts focus on the ways leading companies will compete and collaborate in the future.

“By 2026, more than 50% of large organizations will compete as collaborative digital ecosystems rather than discrete firms, sharing inputs, assets and innovations.”
The world and our supply chains have some huge challenges looming, such as navigating the energy transition and moving toward a circular economy, just to name two. Supply chain leaders need to recognize they can’t take on these challenges alone anymore but need to develop ecosystem partnerships to include novel partners like start-ups, academia and even competitors.

“By 2024, supply chains redesigned for modularity will operationalize business model innovations in half the time of competitors.”
A critical source of competitive advantage for supply chains will be the ability to make operating model change easier, faster, safer and less costly. Modular operating model designs help create composability, breaking supply chain resources and processes into “LEGO blocks” of capabilities that can be quickly reused and reconfigured.

“By 2026, more than 50% of supply chain organizations will use machine learning to augment decision-making capability.”
To prepare for this shift, supply chain leaders will need to develop an integrated, end-to-end roadmap that is driven and prioritized by the business case. You must also support people with their digital skills development programs.

Good luck keeping your resolutions and if you’d like to hear more about our Predicts you can listen to the latest episode of our Supply Chain Podcast: Supply Chain Predicts 2022 (Strategy) With Simon Bailey, also available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and Google Podcasts.

Simon Bailey
Senior Director Analyst
Gartner Supply Chain
Simon.Bailey@gartner.com