Leveraging technology to cushion businesses from global disasters

Reverting to old business models or investing in technologies to ‘keep the lights on’ will no longer suffice. [iStockphoto]

Running a business is hard enough without having to rebuild after disturbances such as the global pandemic, regional instabilities and natural disasters.

Many businesses all over the world make the mistake of not properly preparing for disasters and are left to suffer the costly consequences, Kenyan firms are no exception.

The impact of disasters continues to cause supply chain volatility and disruptions for businesses, especially manufacturers and distributors.  These have resulted in the need for highly agile strategies that are responsive to the ever-changing market needs.

A study into how manufacturers and distributors need to rethink and realign their supply chain to engineer a bounce-back shows that 70 per cent of manufacturing and distribution businesses experienced supply chain disruptions. 60 per cent of businesses were unable to engage and collaborate with customers and suppliers in real-time.

While collaboration and supply chain disruptions have been the biggest areas of impact, only 45 per cent of businesses have the systems in place to address these disruptions and effectively collaborate with external suppliers and customers.

According to Paul De Matos, the Chief Product Officer at SYSPRO, reverting to old business models or investing in technologies to ‘keep the lights on’ will no longer suffice.

“While there has been downtime, manufacturers and distributors have the opportunity now to make a change to improve operational efficiency and thrive now and into the future,” said Mr Matos.

It is due to this that we are seeing manufacturers leverage digital solutions to revolutionise the way they do business and manage disruptions.

Visibility across operations results in better data-driven decisions and helps resolve demand and supply imbalances. Cloud ERP, for instance, allows businesses to integrate disparate systems, unifies data silos and accelerates the development and deployment of new services which is critical in volatile times.

Customer expectations are rising, and industries are seeing the need to carve out new revenue streams and use real-time data, predictive analytics, and automation to increase supply chain efficiencies, lower costs, reduce downtime and increase productivity and quality.

The study further reveals that only 20 per cent of manufacturing and distribution businesses have looked at investing in big data analytics in response to the ongoing disruptions.  Without data insights organizations are unable to see shifts along the supply chain and collaborate with customers and suppliers in real-time.

In the wake of disasters such as climate change, wars and pandemics, businesses are urged to have resilient supply chains which can withstand the impact of both short-term and long-term disruptions to enable them to meet business obligations without significant impact on service levels.