This presentation provides an overview of how global supply chains, particularly across the manufacturing sector have been impacted by disruptions over the years. From Earthquakes, flooding and limited export of rare earth materials from China, companies are having to redesign their supply chains and B2B infrastructures to build extra resilience against future disruption. Updated May 2014
Hello and welcome to this webinar hosted by GXS, my name is Mark Morley, Industry Marketing Director.
Over the new few minutes I would like to discuss how companies are having to change the way in which they manage their supply chains in order to survive. Over the past couple of years there have been numerous incidents which have impacted supply chains around the world, most notably in the manufacturing sector where automotive and high tech companies have been severely impacted.
In order to increase resilience across global supply chains, companies are having to not only introduce operational changes, but they are having to introduce IT infrastructure changes as well. This webinar will discuss some of these operational and IT changes in a bit more detail and more specifically how B2B solutions can help to increase resilience in today’s supply chains.
So let me start this session by outlining a brief agenda.
So in terms of an agenda for this session I will briefly recap some of the major disruptions that have occurred over the past couple of years and I will describe how supply chains have been impacted.
I will then go on to discuss some of the more relevant research studies that have been carried out in the areas of business and operational risk before going on to discuss some of the operational changes that companies are making to minimise future supply chain disruption.
I will close this session by describing how B2B solutions and services can help to minimise supply chain risk.
So let me begin by discussing some of the ways in which global supply chains have been impacted in recent years.
I am not sure if this is an effect of El Nino but it does seem strange that various corners of the earth have experienced significant natural disasters over the past couple of years. Just as companies think they are recovering from one disaster, another one strikes in quick succession, so I firmly believe that supply chain disruption is a recurring theme and it is certainly here to stay.
As a result of this disruption companies are now being forced into building more scalable and flexible supply chains that are more resilient to disruptions, either from natural disasters or otherwise.
The eruption of the volcano in Iceland in 2010 led to much of Europe’s airspace being shutdown due to the spread of volcanic ash in the atmosphere. As a result, global air freight shipments were severely affected. I have heard a few stories of large manufacturers chartering 747 cargo planes to makes sure that they could import/export goods very quickly before the airspace was shutdown completely.
Early last year Japan faced one of its most disruptive natural disasters in its history, with the East coast being severely affected by the earthquake. Many factories and utility infrastructures were destroyed and logistics networks ground to a halt. Japanese manufacturers are being told to expect further disruptions to their supply chains this summer due to the nuclear power stations being taken offline and power companies asking their industrial customers to reduce power consumption by 5%
As we know now, the resulting Tsunami in Japan caused more longer lasting damage to it’s infrastructure and as a result supply chains have been impacted for more than 12 months.
Then towards the end of 2011, global high tech supply chains were severely impacted by the floods in Thailand, at one point it was estimated that the delivery of 90% of the world’s supply of hard disks had been affected.
Honda’s factory was severely affected by the floods and as a result millions of dollars worth of cars had to be written off. Due to the increasing value of the Japanese Yen and Honda’s need to continue building cars in the region, they have decided to rebuild the factory and make it more resilient to future floods rather than pull out of the country altogether.
Another unexpected source of supply chain disruption has come from the Somali pirates, many of whom have been hijacking oil tankers, container ships and ocean going liners. Goods exported from the West coast of India have had to be re-routed around the problem areas adding valuable time to ocean freight based logistics networks in the region.
Ocean freight is susceptible to disruption when a major container ship runs in to trouble. Most of the containerised cargo has to be written off.
And in some cases where containers do make it to land, there is very little chance of the goods getting to their intended customer in one piece, as depicted by this photograph of people removing a brand new BMW motorbike from a container that landed on a beach in the south coast of the UK. You can just imagine BMW Customer Services saying– “Sorry Sir, we cannot seem to trace your new motorbike which was enroute from our factory in Germany!”
China exports millions of tonnes of rare earth materials each year, some have estimated this to be up to 90% of the world’s supplies. This material is a core ingredient to the manufacture of electronic components used in many consumer electronic devices. The Chinese government last year tried to restrict the export of these materials and this had an effect on the global distribution of electronic components across high tech supply chains. Rather than being held to ransom by the Chinese government again, many companies are looking to find alternative sources of raw earth materials, for example Japanese companies are looking to source from former Soviet Union countries instead.
The UK almost ground to a halt a few years ago due to a tanker driver strike and this was nearly repeated earlier this year. Even though the planned strike did not take place in April, it did not stop the UK government from sending out advice for drivers to stock up on fuel, this advice caused nationwide panic buying and inevitable fuel shortages. The retail and grocery industry is always first to feel the pain during this kind of disruption.
An explosion at the Evonik Industries factory in Germany caused a global shortage of CDT, a key ingredient of PA12 which is widely used across the automotive industry. Quite how the industry can rely on one or two suppliers for such a key material is beyond belief in this day and age.
So let me now discuss some research studies which highlight how companies could build increased resilience through improved information sharing.
The world economic forum has undertaken a number of studies in the area of risk management and their most recent global risk report highlighted how companies are impacted by business and operational risk and how a domino effect ripples through a company once disruption takes place. So in this example when a natural disaster takes place, companies may experience property damage, then some form of business interruption, this then impacts supply chains which in turn impacts brand reputation which leads to a drop in sales which ultimately impacts cash flow.
This study from the Bank of Japan shows how they assess companies using 18 metrics to see if they are suitable for loans or mortgages.
As expected most companies faired quite well in the top right quadrant but the area of the chart where many companies were weak was in what can be described as the Information management and communications sector shown on the left hand side of the diagram. It is interesting to note that on average most of the companies applying for some form of loan struggled to get a high assessment number relating to the deployment of information management systems across their extended enterprise.
Another study from APICS, the association for operations management in the U.S, highlights other forms of supply chain risk and in this case two results that I wanted to bring to your attention on this slide are how inadequate relationship management and lack of information sharing can have an impact on supply chain risk. Strange to think that this has a higher focus than suppliers actually going out of business.
In a similar manner, research from APICS also highlighted that many companies failed to understand the full structure of their supply chain. In fact very few had taken the time to actually map out their supply chain from end to end. Knowing the potential weak points in your supply chain should be a key requirement for any supply chain director.
At the world economic forum in Davos this year, world leaders discussed why:
Increasing supply chain related resilience is key to sustained economic growth and prosperity and
Minimising supply chain disruptions and ensuring continued operations should be high on the agenda of every company CEO
Increased use of cloud based B2B solutions can significantly contribute towards this goal
So let me now discuss some of the operational changes that companies have been making across their supply chains.
Many companies, especially in the manufacturing sector, have been busy implementing a number of different operational changes across their businesses. Given that the manufacturing sector is one of the more global industry sectors, it is not surprising that decentralising operations or spreading the production risk to multiple countries has become a key theme of many companies. Let me now go through some of the more popular ways that companies have been making operational changes to their operations.
- Near Shoring
- Establish a ‘Global Plant Floor’
- Shift Production to New Locations
- Map Out Supply Chains/Networks
- Introduce Dual Sourcing Strategies
- Implement Control Towers/Crisis Management Centres
- Appoint a Business Continuity Manager
During the most recent economic downturn, companies were quick to establish manufacturing locations in low cost emerging markets or in countries with an abundance of high quality suppliers. Due to the increasing length of some supply chains, companies started to look for sourcing locations closer to their home markets, with the ultimate aim of trying to shorten logistics networks to speed up the delivery of goods. The recent natural disasters, especially in Japan have forced some manufacturers to move production back to their home markets at an accelerated rate. Near shoring or Reverse Globalisation has become a necessity for some companies to stay in business.
One example of a manufacturer moving production back to North America is Caterpillar. They decided to move production of one of their more popular mini-excavators from Japan to their plant in North America. The increasing value of the Japanese Yen has also provided another reason for companies to look for alternative manufacturing locations outside of Japan. In fact interestingly, I have seen more inward investment in North America in the first five months of this year than at any other time since I joined GXS six years ago.
An alternative to near shoring has been to ramp up production at alternative production sites around the world. For example rather than manufacturing one type of product in a specific country, companies are trying to ensure that they can manufacture a specific product at multiple locations. This is essentially spreading the manufacturing risk so to speak and thus ensuring continued production during a period of significant disruption.
In addition to spreading the manufacturing risk, many automotive companies for example have been working to de-centralise their design departments. This had been driven by a need to bring the design process closer to the end market. For example BMW and Volvo have established design centres in China and Honda announced at the Detroit motorshow this year that they would be designing and manufacturing their next generation super car, the NSX, at a new facility in Ohio where their production facilities are based. This de-centralised approach to the design of future cars has driven an increasing need to be able to transfer very large CADCAM files.
As is always the case in these types of situations, other countries were very quick to start marketing themselves to the companies that had been severely impacted in some way. Some governments started to announce investments in state of the art science and technology parks and also offering significant tax breaks if companies invested in their country.
An example of this is Taiwan who was very quick to promote their country to the high tech companies that had been impacted by the Japanese Earthquake and Tsunami. Taiwan is keen to raise their profile as being one of the leading countries for high tech companies to invest in.
One key area that has been highlighted for immediate improvement is mapping out supply chains. It is one thing to have end-to-end visibility of supply chain transactions but how many companies know every single company involved in their supply chain?. In the case of an automotive company the car manufacturer would leave it to their Tier 1 supplier to manage their downstream suppliers, ie Tier 2, Tier 3 and Tier 4 and smaller. When Toyota were impacted by the earthquake they had no idea how their supply chain was going to be impacted and they had to rely on key tier 1 suppliers such as Denso to help them out. Mapping out supply chains has become a key activity over the past 12 months and many companies have been able to increase their supply chain resilience through embracing this process. Of course once a company has mapped out their supply chain, the various inter-company relationships need to be maintained on an ongoing basis to ensure that contact information is correct.
In this example from Honda, a researcher at Ohio university spent three years mapping out every single supplier of components to the centre console of one of their cars. The fact that it took three years helps to illustrate why it is important to map out supply chains right at the beginning of the production life of a vehicle rather than trying to do it retrospectively. Mapping out suppliers in this way has helped Honda to identify key points of weakness across their global supply chain and has allowed them to implement alternative sources for components should disruption occur at one of their plants in the future.
Identifying alternative sources for components, more commonly known as dual sourcing, has become one of the simplest ways that companies have been able to build additional resilience into their supply chains. These alternative suppliers need to be identified very quickly during a time of crisis and they must have components or parts available should they be required. Dual sourcing may not be required for every component in a product but it should certainly be considered for key parts. Over the last few years companies have been persuaded to reduce their buffer stocks as a way to reduce operational costs, but lean manufacturing, as in this case, is not always a good strategy. In this case we have started to see many companies start to increase their buffer stocks once again so that they can ride out the storm so to speak.
Many companies have implemented control towers or centralised locations for being able to monitor supply chain related transactions and activities. Recent natural disasters have seen these control towers take on a new area of responsibility, namely becoming crisis management centres. During a time of crisis a company needs a centralised approach to how they send out mass communications to trading partners and supply chain participants across the extended enterprise. Once again, as highlighted earlier, unless you have your suppliers’ contact details in a centralised location it is going to become very difficult to send out mass communications in any sort of organised manner.
One increasing trend I have noticed on professional networking web sites such as LinkedIn or Xing has been the emergence or rise of the business continuity manager role. This person becomes the go-to employee during a period of disruption, they become the central person who is responsible for steering a company through a period of supply chain disruption. Sometimes referred to as the ‘Masters of Disaster’, these people are key to making today’s supply chains operate efficiently and seamlessly. The ability to proactively monitor supply chains and almost sense when disruption is likely to occur has become a key competitive weapon that companies have been keen to implement. Increasing regulatory compliance has also made the business continuity manager more visible in today’s extended enterprise. In summary, being unprepared is bad for business.
So moving on to the final section of this webinar, how can B2B solutions and services help to minimise supply chain risk?
If we return back to the spider diagram from the Bank of Japan, you may remember that one of the weakest areas that companies struggled to address during a period of disruption was information management and communications, shown by the green quadrant on the left hand side of the diagram. B2B solutions can certainly help to improve the flow of information and contribute significantly to increasing supply chain resilience.
One of the key areas where B2B tools can help minimise supply chain disruption is in the area of community management, after all when a natural disaster strikes you need to make sure you can remain in contact with your trading partner community or identify alternative sources for materials very quickly. Community management tools help in three ways.
Firstly, community management tools can help to establish what can best be described as a centralised B2B contact directory, typically a self serving environment where all contact information for a particular supplier can be held. If working as part of a complex supply chain such as those found in the automotive or high tech sectors then they can also help you to understand the structure of these supply chains, effectively building a map of your supply chain. As a condition of doing business with some companies, suppliers will be forced to enroll through a workflow driven registration process to ensure that they provide all the relevant contact information concerning their business.
Secondly, community management tools help to improve command and control processes across your supply chains. They allow you to quickly assess the state of your supply chain in terms of identifying which suppliers have been impacted following a period of significant disruption.
As the suppliers provided all their contact information during the registration process, community management tools allow you to send out mass communications with ease. You can also ask suppliers to complete online surveys to assess the condition of your supply chain, if they are unable to meet specific supply demand levels from their customers then you can quickly identify alternative sources for these components or parts. Dual sourcing of key components is becoming a popular method of combatting supply chain disruption and community management tools help to orchestrate the selection of alternative suppliers very quickly.
Finally, community management tools help to minimise supply chain risk. Companies deploy Microsoft office tools for creating documents, they implement ERP systems for managing production and employee processes so why not implement community management tools to help establish a dedicated IT infrastructure to help assess, manage and mitigate supply chain risk.
When was the last time your company undertook a risk assessment of your supply chain, how long did it take to complete, did every company participate in the assessment, how did you apply scores and weightings to the results and what corrective actions did you take to mitigate future risk. The ability to assess the state of your supply chain via simple to use community management tools helps to bring a significant competitive advantage during a period of supply chain disruption. Has your company thought about setting up a trading partner risk database as part of a process of increasing resilience across your supply chain?
This brings us to the end of this webinar, we hope it has provided you with some insights in to how companies are trying to improve the management of their supply chains during periods of disruption and how community management tools can help build additional resilience across today’s global supply chains.
So I guess I should leave you with one last thought, is your supply chain prepared?