How creativity can help improve supply chain resilience

Navigating the polycrisis

In the business world today, challenges can snowball. Multiple challenges can cascade on top of each other to become a bigger crisis – a poly crisis.  Omera explains, “by the poly crisis, what we mean is that we have multiple risk factors. These could be technological, environmental, geopolitical. We don't know where the risks are coming from. And it becomes very difficult to develop a response system to that”. According to Omera, this is what makes resilience in supply chains so difficult to achieve. 

Redundancy, capacity, and process alignment

Omera goes on to explain the roles of redundancy and capacity in supply chains and their role in building supply chain resilience. It’s important to have access to capacity when it’s needed the most. For example, this could be with inventory. During the pandemic, most supply chains became so lean that they couldn’t handle the sheer load put on them. So, we need to be able to create capacity so it can be used when we most need it. 
  
“We need to also have some amount of redundancy in our organisation to be able to respond and be agile to unpredictable changes that can occur at any part of the supply chain network” says Dr Omera. But what you need to really seek in your supply chain is process alignment. To mitigate risks, you’ve got to align all the different functions, processes, and people. 

Embedding creativity into supply chains

Having design and innovation is not enough. World class supply chains embed creativity and product innovation throughout. “The design and innovation needs to be integrated with the rest of the supply chain – that's the important part” says Omera. In other words, de-risking the supply chain starts on the drawing board. “Lots of companies have great designers and design departments, but if those designers are not a critical part of the strategic supply chain decision making, then it's not fruitful,” she says.  

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