Gearing up and getting back on track – UK-centric supply chain group

Webinar title: Gearing up and Getting Back on Track

Organiser: UK Centric Supply Chains Group

Event website

Key take-aways:

Use the COVID-19 crisis to assess your supply chains: It’s important to test your supply chain for ‘disruption antibodies’ says Dr Aristides Matopoulos, associate professor at Aston University. Look at how well or badly they’ve performed during the Coronavirus crisis. It’s also key to understand your place and where you sit in the supply chain. This will help highlight potential bottlenecks or opportunities. The UK Centric Supply Chain Group has developed a tool to health-check your supply chains, which can be found here.

Beware your optimism bias, and be prepared for set-backs: If you’re attempting to reposition your business to make it more resilient, be warned: 70 per cent of business re-engineering projects fail, according to a Mckinsey report published in 2015. Dr Brian Price, researcher at Aston University, says that though this may sound a little gloomy, relatively simple scenario planning at the beginning of any re-engineering project can help avoid a lot of the pitfalls. It’s also important to have someone to play devil’s advocate to help avoid ‘optimism bias’ – where you automatically think your new project will be a success and don’t consider potential challenges.

Diversify with care: Diversification is something many businesses will look at in the current climate, but you have to find the balance between resilience and having a sustainable business, because if you build in too much resilience you may find your idea is obsolete in a few years time, according to Professor Matopoulos. Dr Price added that if you’re going to pivot you need to do some planning, but not too much so that you miss your window of opportunity.

Webinar attended by Matt Gooding, Tech Corridor marketing manager. Follow Matt on Twitter.

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