The COVID-19 pandemic brings with it huge impacts with ripples that have spread far and wide. While the consumers see the impact in the form of empty shelves in the local supermarkets, the backstory tells a tale of a collapse of production facilities, shortage of raw material and lack of manpower due to lockdowns across various parts of the world. With the governments across the globe trying to contain it, the effect of COVID-19 are proving to be relentless and unprecedented in its scale and severity for human beings and supply chain.

Under these trying circumstances, businesses are grappling with hard choices and difficult questions:

• Should they broaden their supplier choices, or do more local or near-shore sourcing?
• How much inventory of raw materials, sub-assemblies and finished products should they stock to tide over the crisis?
• Globalization Vs Localization?
  
  

Here are some actions that organizations need to prioritize:

Hone your risk mitigation strategies

Businesses should re-visit their procurement strategies for raw-material, and for finished good. Companies may need to invest to ensure that their supply chains are resilient. Companies must look at new ways to stabilize their supply chains. A few measures that they can take are:

• Enlist new suppliers
• Boost inventories
• Invest in omni-channel distribution including on-line sales.
  
  

Be proactive and agile

In the current situations, companies may need more capital for production planning and product delivery. Some steps that can be taken are:

• Re-purposing production lines (for instance, LVMH, the French maker of Dior and Givenchy perfumes and cosmetics, has decided to repurpose its production lines to make hand sanitizers to cope with shortages)
• Rethink how your approach to globalization and strengthen local connects
• Prepare for a long haul and keep an eagle eye on the still-changing scenario
  
  

Source: https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/veeraraghavan-supply-chain/

About us

Wadhwani Foundation’s primary mission is accelerating economic development in emerging economies by driving large-scale job creation through entrepreneurship, innovation and skills development. Founded in 2000 by Silicon Valley entrepreneur, Dr. Romesh Wadhwani, today the Foundation is scaling impact in 25 countries across Asia, Africa, and Latin America through various Initiatives like the Wadhwani Advantage.

Wadhwani Advantage is a program for small businesses with an employee strength of 50 to 250 employees. The program offers high-quality advisory, strategic and operational service pro bono and at a subsidized fee by our mentor-advisor consultants or partners. The program is enabled through the Wadhwani Advantage APP. The APP gives you instant access to personalized action-oriented content and connects. The program includes 1-12 months of engagement to help you achieve hyper growth. It also offers up to three years of hand-holding support enabled through our Artificial Intelligence (AI)-enabled platform. Download the Wadhwani Advantage app on Google Play and App Store.

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