Businesses and countries have acknowledged the supply chain disruption they have witnessed in the past years and have concluded that they need resilient supply chains to sustain the future. However, building a resilient supply chain for the future requires more than just aligning supply with demand or having a robust supply chain infrastructure, or redrafting policies and regulations around it.
A resilient supply chain of tomorrow will be connected, transparent, and available to decision-makers to respond to the changes in the market faster. Tomorrow’s successful organizations will adopt an agile, flexible approach to business transformation. They will focus their budgets on targeted, high-impact, modular strategies: cloud-enabling or outsourcing some parts of their supply chains as a priority; hybridizing some — but not all — supply chain management roles to incorporate greater data science capability; or migrating non-standard manufacturing to micro supply chains while retaining their mature global networks for the manufacturing of standardized products and parts.
At its core, companies need to utilize data to understand supply chain material flows — a critical requirement to move from strategic intent to realizing a sustainable supply chain. Organizations could use this data-backed supply chain in making key business decisions around energy security, GDP contribution from priority sectors, labor market, and export-import of industrial products.
While countries embrace the digital transformation, there is also a need to leverage this transformation to boost local content. Many countries are developing initiatives around integrating supply chains and developing supply chain value maps across supplier tiers to the customer.
Leveraging cross-functional data and exploiting micro supply chains are some of the action points that organizations could undertake to have a future-ready, resilient supply chain. While embarking on this journey, it is also essential to build management capability and the vision to attain an ethical and sustainable supply chain.
In Saudi Arabia, several entities were established over the last decade to activate new policies and legislation with the aim of accelerating the implementation of local content development in the country and transforming the Kingdom into an industrial powerhouse. There is a lot of focus and rethinking on developing an ethical, data-driven, and sustainable supply chain in the Kingdom and utilizing it to drive localization.
This paper presents our approach to tomorrow’s supply chain, and dives into how Saudi Arabia is embracing this digital change and its vision and approach to leveraging data to establish local supply chains.
