Types of Visibility That Boost Supply Chain Resilience

With Ukraine examples,  

The Two Types of Visibility That Boost Supply Chain Resilience in SupplyChain Brain

The pandemic and war in Ukraine have caused serious disruption to supply chains. Analysis by Interos shows that more than 2,100 U.S.-based firms, and at least 1,200 in Europe, have Tier 1 suppliers in Russia. In addition, more than 190,000 firms in the U.S. and at least 109,000 in Europe have Tier 2 and 3 suppliers located there.

As companies navigate through the continued pandemic response and uncertainty caused by the war, they’re facing challenges around instability of supply, price inflation, logistics disruption and labor impacts. As a result, the traditional notion of building resiliency in supply chains is evolving — and it should. No longer can companies focus only on flexible manufacturing, increasing inventory or varying supply sources. Instead, the key to building resilience is visibility.

Research from Accenture found that companies with greater visibility are better positioned to handle all kinds of disruptions, creating a more resilient supply chain. What may come as a surprise is that companies don’t need full visibility into everything: An intelligent view into certain product lines, customers or suppliers is often enough.

But what is visibility — and, more specifically, “intelligent visibility” that can be achieved with the use of new technologies and analytics? Most supply chain professionals have a general ideal of what the word means, but there actually are two types of visibility that create resilience in supply chains: structural and dynamic.

Structural Visibility

Structural visibility tells companies where their suppliers and points of manufacturing are, and which logistics routes they use (including those of their partners), and shows interrelationships across the broader supply chain network. It includes traditional activities such as network mapping, classic risk management, network assessments and modeling. Structural visibility is like an X-ray that gives a company a snapshot of its operations at a point in time or over a certain period, and helps uncover vulnerabilities.

Leading companies are generating greater structural visibility using new technologies like the digital twin, a virtual replica of the company’s supply chain. It allows a company to use advanced analytics to simulate and model its supply chain’s performance, and stress-test for risks and vulnerabilities, both critical best practices in preparing for disruptions.

Most companies employ regular network mapping, classic risk management and network simulation, optimization and modeling, a best practice that’s typically done more frequently in times of disruption. While structural visibility isn’t necessarily available for the entire supply base, it can be limited to certain suppliers. ....'

Useful Plans vs the Activity of Planning

Below the intro to former IBMer  Irving Wladawsky-Berger article on planning vs plans ...  much more at the link.  I like especially the differences when you meet with different kinds of events and seek cures for them.  Resilience has to address all of them meaningfully,  risk management is one key tool.

Even When Plans Are Useless, Planning Is Indispensable

“As scientists race to develop a cure for the coronavirus, businesses are trying to assess the impact of the outbreak on their own enterprises,” wrote MIT professor Yossi Sheffi in a February 18 article in the Wall Street Journal.  “Just as scientists are confronting an unknown enemy, corporate executives are largely working blind because the coronavirus could cause supply-chain disruptions that are unlike anything we have seen in the past 70 years.”

Sheffi is Director of the MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics.  He’s written extensively on the critical need for resilience in global enterprises and their supply chains, - including The Power of Resilience and The Resilient Enterprise, - so they can better react to major unexpected events.  Covid-19 is the kind of massively disruptive event he had in mind when he wrote those books.

While learning from historical precedents is always a good idea, recent supply chain disruptions - the 2003 outbreak of SARS in Asia, the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster, or the 2011 Thailand floods, - were very different from our current pandemic.  Those events were much more localized, lasted a relatively short time, and they mostly impacted supply, not demand.  The impact of Covid-19 is much bigger, affecting consumer demand as well as supply chains all over the world, and likely to last quite a bit longer.  “Today’s supply chains are global and more complex than they were in 2003,” with factories all over the world affected by lockdowns and quarantines.  Apple, for example, works with suppliers in 43 countries.   ... "    (much more below in the article) 

David Brin Interviewed on Resiliency

We connected with David Brin a number of times through IFTF.  He is a well known futurist, physicist and Scifi Author.   Also consultant to NASA and NIAC.  Thoughtful piece I am reading.     Resilience  is the ability to bounce back from disaster. Of course disaster has a number of levels of severity, and yours may not be apocalyptic.  Broadly we found resiliency considerations, measures and systematic methods worthwhile regardless.

Unfortunately no free link here to full text, but worth the cost or looking it up on CACM.

An Interview with David Brin on Resiliency
By Peter J. Denning, David Brin 
Communications of the ACM, June 2019, Vol. 62 No. 6, Pages 28-31
10.1145/3325287

Many people today are concerned about critical infrastructures such as the electrical network, water supplies, telephones, transportation, and the Internet. These nerve and bloodlines for society depend on reliable computing, communications, and electrical supply. What would happen if a massive cyber attack or an electromagnetic pulse, or other failure mode took down the electric grid in a way that requires many months or even years for repair? What about a natural disaster such as hurricane, wildfire, or earthquake that disabled all cellphone communications for an extended period?

David Brin, physicist and author, has been worrying about these issues for a long time and consults regularly with companies and federal agencies. He says there are many relatively straightforward measures that might greatly increase our resiliency—our ability to bounce back from disaster. I spoke with him about this.  ...

(Abstract)

Chaos Engineering at Linkedin

Have only interacted with 'Chaos engineering' once.   In particular to look at the broader idea of maintaining process models.  Here a technical view of it used with a popular service. 

Chaos Engineering at LinkedIn: The “LinkedOut” Failure Injection Testing FrameworkLike  | by Daniel Bryant in Infoq

The LinkedIn Engineering team have recently discussed their "LinkedOut" failure injection testing framework in more detail. This framework supports the generation of hypotheses about application and service resilience, and enables failure to be injected to a specific request via the LinkedIn LiX A/B testing framework or via data in a cookie. Failure scenarios that can be tested include errors, delays and timeouts. The LinkedOut project is part of the larger "Waterbear" initiative to encourage every team at LinkedIn to contribute to resilience engineering efforts.   ... " 

Powerful Rituals

Powerful Resilience through  Rituals?   Your Conscious Mind Is An Overconfident Storyteller  a thoughtful piece.   Lately have been looking at the power of storytelling and narrative, so this made me think of confidence in our own stories.

Resilience Power for the Enterprise

Via MIT Sloan.  Very good talk today by MIT Professor Yossi Sheffi, Director of the MIT Center for Transportation & Logistics, on using resilience in the supply chain, with excellent case studies.   Including P&G Katrina example.   This is being tracked in Twitter now at: https://twitter.com/hashtag/resiliencepower