Global Disruption – Opportunity Lurks!

With a catastrophic disruption to energy & raw material supplies brought about by ongoing geopolitical tensions in the Middle East, manufacturing has already or will very soon face significant challenges across the globe. Every major event just goes to reinforce how deeply interconnected the global value chains are, despite political ambitions and claims of complete self-reliance. The crash of 2008, COVID, or just a silly ship getting stuck in the Suez Canal bringing the whole world to a standstill are reminders of these dependencies.

Humans discovered bartering very early, which in essence showed us that we couldn’t have control over all the goods & services that we needed or wanted and instead, invented a way to exchange goods and benefit mutually. We always sought & continue to seek cheaper, better options to trade for. In today’s world, it is doubly reinforced by varying levels of advancements in manufacturing technologies, easy availability of raw materials or just the innate human need to drive a harder bargain – we are all nothing if we are not improving our profit margins!

With a disruption of the scale which we are witnessing at the moment, and with the most optimistic estimates signaling that this could last for at least a few months, what can manufacturers do with supplies drying up, orders not coming through or even if you managed to manufacture products, costs & challenges of shipping these out to customers still seem unsurmountable?

While it might seem like it’s all doom & gloom, I take inspiration from The Story of Two Woodcutters to utilize the downtime we might be facing. Now is the time to sharpen those axes – review business processes, root out inefficiencies & establish practices that will keep organizations moving efficiently.

From simple issues like why does procurement not exactly know what to buy and in what quantities, to complex issues of why do proposals take so much time? The answer to both these questions along with many more that manufacturers face lies in the transmission of information from stakeholder to stakeholder, department to department. Here are a few steps every manufacturer or producer of goods should focus on to enhance those processes.

Humans discovered bartering very early, which in essence showed us that we couldn’t have control over all the goods & services that we needed or wanted and instead, invented a way to exchange goods and benefit mutually. We always sought & continue to seek cheaper, better options to trade for. In today’s world, it is doubly reinforced by varying levels of advancements in manufacturing technologies, easy availability of raw materials or just the innate human need to drive a harder bargain – we are all nothing if we are not improving our profit margins!

How Manufacturers Can Improve Operations During Supply Chain Disruption

1. Establish a Single Source of Truth

What you sell is what you should be quoting for, and what you buy ends up becoming what you sell after you have added your secret sauce. Sounds rudimentary, but I have seen numerous organizations struggle to encapsulate, enumerate answers to these simple questions – What do we sell? What do we buy? And how much do we buy? Maintaining a single source of truth that contains answers to both these questions should be the primary focus of any manufacturer.

2. Systemize Decision-Making Processes

Humans are creatures of habits, and bad habits in particular. Our natural tendencies to find shortcuts end up becoming endemic practices in organizations. Bad excel templates gets passed on from old employees to new employees, bad practices tend to devolve into incorrigible errors. Stem the rot, and implement systemic solutions that encase proper decision making, leaving little room for arbitrary decision making. Establishing clear answers in step #1 smoothens implementing step #2.

3. Eliminate Inefficiencies and Redundant Processes

Successful implementation of step #2 would ideally result in discovering a list of activities in business processes that either add no value, or worse - end up harming the organization by duplicating efforts, wasting time & resources, and diverting the organizations focus on order fulfilment. With successful step #1 – the data required for decision making is already in one place, and with step #2 – decision making is also systemized and standardized. Eliminate unnecessary approval processes, validation & re-validation processes, and bask in the joy of an optimized process running like a well-oiled engine.

Use the downtimes to sharpen that axe, so that your organization gets rid of the dead wood and sets off on a path to smart manufacturing. Getting the fundamentals right will eventually set the stage for Industrial Internet of Things (IoT), machine learning & AI paving the way towards Industry 4.0.

From Crisis to Transformation

This is exactly what solutions like GatorPAS are designed to enable, an all-in-one enterprise platform that combines powerful enterprise software with connected industrial assets to give manufacturers full visibility and control over their operations. By unifying data, workflows, and systems, GatorPAS enables manufacturers to move from fragmented processes to fully integrated, intelligent operations, effectively “sharpening the axe” in times of disruption.

Learn how you can make the most of this period of disruption with GatorPAS.

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