Beyond resilience to Total Value

Disruption to global trade over recent years has revealed the inherent fragilities of traditional supply chain models. In New Zealand, we remain reliant on global supply chains to keep goods and services flowing into the country, and to maintain economic growth. In response, leaders have focused on building supply chain resilience.

Now, tariff turbulence, further geopolitical complexity, and an increasingly demanding customer environment are compelling organisations to take a more holistic view of their supply chain strategies. Some of the most forward-looking leaders recognise that resilience is no longer the end goal, but the starting point. They are striving toward the new strategic imperative to create what is called ‘Total Value’ for the organisation.

Introducing Total Value

At KPMG we consider that ‘Total Value’ shifts the organisational lens from merely enduring supply chain disruption to actively pursuing enterprise-wide value maximisation. In our view, it is not a replacement for supply chain resilience, but a strategic evolution.

Total Value can unite Total Experience (the strategic value that a high performing supply chain can add to the customer) and Total Performance (the strategic value that a high performing supply chain can add to the business) to seamlessly integrate critical business dimensions.

Total Experience

Total Experience is the unification of customer, employee, partner, and digital interactions into one seamless, intelligent ecosystem. It focuses on empowering every touchpoint to help deliver value to clients, and is built on five core principles:

Customer centricity

Total Experience demands understanding and responding to actual customer needs, which involves mapping customer journeys to identify pain points and opportunities, designing services and products that reflect customer experiences, and embedding customer feedback loops into supply chain planning.
Data-driven insights

In Total Experience, data is leveraged to predict demand shifts and proactively adjust supply chain flows, personalise customer experiences, and to enable scenario planning and risk mitigation.
Cohesive integration

By integrating commercial, finance, operations, procurement, and strategy, decisions become accelerated and more informed, teams align on shared KPIs that reflect enterprise-wide goals, and customers experience seamless interactions from order placement to delivery and support.
Employee empowerment

Empowered employees are critical to Total Experience, which means providing intuitive tools and platforms that enable quick decision making, encouraging a culture of ownership and innovation, and training teams to interpret data and act on insights.
Technology enablement

Technology underpins the entire Total Value framework, and should be used to simplify workflows and enhance operations. The tech stack should feature automation and AI-driven insights and enable real-time visibility across the supply chain.

Total Performance

Total Performance is about doing the right things faster, smarter, and more sustainably, aligned to high-performing operational outcomes. It is about delivering measurable outcomes across five dimensions:

Financial performance

Total Performance focuses on enhancing profitability, strengthening working capital, and driving cost efficiencies while enabling adequate risk mitigation. It also focuses on helping to optimise inventory levels, improve forecasting accuracy, and balance cost efficiency with risk resilience.
Operational excellence

This is the engine of Total Performance and drives functional maturity by focusing on eliminating bottlenecks and inefficiencies, standardising and automating workflows to help improve speed and consistency, and enhancing agility.
People performance

People are key to achieving Total Performance. Organisations should ensure that teams are equipped with the right tools, data, and autonomy to make decisions, that cross-functional collaboration is encouraged, and engagement is prioritised.
Innovation

Total Performance means that innovation in the supply chain is about rethinking how value is delivered by exploring new fulfilment mindsets, such as hyperlocal delivery or circular logistics, leveraging AI, blockchain, and IoT to enhance visibility and responsiveness, and co-creating with partners and customers to develop differentiated offerings.
Sustainability

Sustainability is a core performance driver of Total Value, featuring a focus on reducing carbon emissions through smarter routing, modal shifts, and energy efficient operations, helping to ensure ethical sourcing as well as supplier compliance, and integrating sustainability KPIs into operational dashboards and decision making.

Expert view

For one senior executive, at a global building technologies company, a key focus is service transformation. The senior executive says the organisation is driving a three-pillar approach to exceptional customer service — which starts with the customer need, then incorporates the commercial aspects, then thirdly the operational aspects.

“It’s that full triangle that has to come together to deliver on the experience – you need the right offerings that align with customer needs, you need the right pricing and a sales team that can articulate that value — along with a sales compensation structure that aligns to that — and you need operations and distribution that supports the promise,” she says. “The key is stepping back and saying, ‘what are the outcomes that customers are looking for, and how do I solve those outcomes?’ Those outcomes start in those three pillars.”

How Total Value enhances resilience

Total Value can be achieved by elevating both the customer experience (Total Experience) and operational performance (Total Performance) across the entire enterprise. The outcome can include sustained growth, enhanced efficiency, and a distinct competitive advantage. Importantly, it builds on the work already done on supply chain resilience in several ways:

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Extending visibility beyond the supply chain

While traditional approaches to build supply chain resilience focus on end-to-end visibility, Total Value expands this scope to include customer journeys and satisfaction metrics. It also focuses on streamlining internal processes, enabling consistent and transparent financial transactions and reconciliation, and gaining insight into the entire lifecycle of product and service ecosystems.

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Connecting silos

Total Value can cultivate a ‘one organisation’ view centred on the customer, helping to ensure all functions contribute to delivering customer value. It promotes cross-functional collaboration and integration by aligning sales, marketing, and commercial teams for a unified customer approach; aligning finance and procurement functions by integrating financial planning with sourcing strategies; and connecting strategy and innovation by linking the long-term vision with agile development and implementation.

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Leveraging data for strategic impact

Supply chain resilience and Total Value are both data-driven, yet they apply data differently. Resilience focuses on alerts, simulations, product flow optimisation, and risk mitigation. Meanwhile, Total Value uses data for the personalisation of products, services, and interactions, consistently refining business processes and strategies, and to inform long-term transformation and innovation.

Strategic integration

To illustrate the power of Total Value, consider a disruption in a critical supplier network. A resilience-focused approach would identify the issue, model its immediate impact, and find alternative suppliers or logistics routes. In a Total Value approach, the organisation would orchestrate a multi-dimensional, integrated response that restores operations, and also strengthens the business across customer, employee, financial, and innovation dimensions.

Key steps in this scenario would include immediate customer communication to provide transparent updates, leveraging technology to empower staff to handle the disruption effectively, and rapidly re-evaluating supplier contracts, payment terms and any risk exposure. Next, through data capture and root cause analysis, the business would seek to understand the disruption’s origin and use this insight for future improvement. This demonstrates how Total Value can help ensure that the organisation both recovers from the disruption and emerges better positioned for future growth.

Expert view

The senior executive gives the example of an organisation that placed its accounts receivable department within customer service rather than within finance, as a delayed bill could indicate a delay in delivery that the operations team need to be aware of.

“It could be a signal that there is an experience problem that they need to solve, and they can act faster for the benefit of both the customer and the business,” they say.

How stakeholders can benefit from Total Value

Adopting a Total Value mindset can offer significant advantages for all key stakeholders. Suppliers and partners benefit from improved collaboration and greater transparency. The organisation gains enhanced efficiency, resilience, and innovation. Employees are empowered through real-time insights, intuitive tools, and streamlined workflows. Customers experience more personalised interactions and proactive issue resolution, while end consumers benefit from greater pricing stability and product availability.

Total Value as a strategic imperative

With supply chain disruption ever-present, resilience can be the bedrock of operational stability. However, elevating from a focus on resilience to Total Value enables opportunity, growth, and innovation. This focus on experience, performance, technology, and data means organisations can both enhance the supply chain while unlocking increased value for the business overall.

Our insights

From focusing on Total Value to more centralization of the function globally, supply chain leaders should be thinking more strategically than ever in the year ahead.

Moving from projects to orchestration — and pulling ahead.

This measure has always been important, but with so many forces now affecting the supply chain, it’s time to get granular.

As “agentic AI” transforms business processes and functions, we believe that the outperformers will balance their adoption of evolving technologies with a relentless focus on humans — especially customers.

Our people

Lance Webb

Head of Customer Experience

NEW ZEALAND

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Beyond resilience to Total Value