EVER BELIEVE SUPPLY CHAIN LIMITED

This primer provides a new way of thinking about the future of supply chains—bringing together the top procurement priorities of leading global businesses and the key forces of change reshaping the very business models that have given rise to global supply chains—to enable supply chain leaders to envision and manage future-fit supply chains. In the months ahead, BSR will convene a series of targeted dialogues, experiential futures workshops, and a collaborative initiative that will incubate and expand on these solutions in real time, sharing and elaborating on new models that leading companies are already putting in place. Improvements in real-time data availability allow for more dynamic decision-making, which can in turn support cost savings and enable procurement to more efficiently manage cash. Improved technology can also allow for real-time insights into invoice approval status and facilitate faster transactions. Simplifying supply chains creates business efficiencies and can help to reduce uncertainty and risk. Working with a smaller number of suppliers creates the conditions under which traceability, supplier partnership, and supplier-enabled innovation can flourish. Risk mitigation will continue to be paramount for procurement leaders through 2025, but the approach to delivering on this priority is changing. In the past few years, there has been tremendous growth in the number of tools and technologies available to support supply chain risk prediction, and many of these include sustainability dimensions, such as environmental, ethical, and human rights risk monitoring. Procurement leaders are working to understand and test the capabilities of these tools and considering integration into and interoperability with existing systems across the business. CEOs increasingly look to CPOs to understand market dynamics, support business agility through foresight, and enable differentiation through innovation with suppliers. For example, companies describe opportunities to strengthen demand planning and inventory management in tandem with suppliers. Others highlight a need to enhance their supplier development platforms in order to achieve public-facing sustainability goals, such as science-based climate targets. Companies are digitally transforming the management of their supply chains by piloting and applying technologies such as machine learning, blockchain, and augmented reality to traditional supply chain management activities. Supply chains are becoming hyper-transparent as suppliers, workers, and communities access increasingly sophisticated technologies and use them to create and share information about environmental and social performance. Automation and advanced manufacturing are already having significant impacts on supply chains and will continue to reshape the labor force and the total costs of sourcing, especially in industries that are suited for automation (e. g. electronics), and in countries that have traditionally been the engines of global supply chains. While the exact effects of climate change in supply chains cannot be precisely predicted, supply chains are particularly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change due to their reliance on raw materials and concentration in countries likely to be impacted by climate change. These impacts are likely to increase in frequency and severity as global temperatures continue to rise. For example, according to the WHO, ILO, and UNDP, by 2030, productivity losses related to heat-related workplace disruption and injury could rise above US$2 trillion. Transnational labor migration is an established trend, but the past several decades have seen an increase in mass migration, with more than 240 million people living outside their countries of birth. More recently, we breached an ominous global milestone: the greatest number of forcibly displaced people ever recorded. For example, migrants are particularly vulnerable to labor abuses due to language barriers, lack of formal networks, and limited legal protections. Advances in digital technology have enabled high levels of personalization in marketing and product design and fuel the growing on-demand economy. In the U. S. alone, consumers are spending nearly US$60 billion in on-demand services such as online marketplaces and transportation. Adding complexity to this trend, as companies look to meet demand for custom goods and faster delivery times in some parts of the world, they are also looking for growth opportunities in new markets and among new customer groups, including “base-of-the-pyramid” populations. For example, as the U. looks to weaken the Dodd-Frank Act, which requires corporate disclosure on tax payments and on conflict minerals due diligence, France adopted the “duty of care” law, requiring French companies to implement due diligence plans to address human rights and environmental risks. regrettably announced its intent to withdraw from the Paris Agreement, hundreds of university presidents, mayors, and governors in U. cities and states redoubled their commitments to the international accord. Companies can mitigate this volatility through fostering responsible and inclusive labor practices. For example, businesses sourcing from regions impacted by mass migration can re-direct resources to engage with industry peers and cross-border actors, including government, labor unions, and employers, to reinforce legal frameworks and insist on better enforcement of labor laws. Business can also support the empowerment of individual workers within their supply chains through enabling them to participate in and lead trade unions and other forms of worker representation, by using technology like mobile apps to help workers understand their legal rights, and through evolving technologies that directly gather workers’ views. Companies can build on the lessons learned in well-worn sourcing locations such as China to develop smart sourcing models in emerging hubs such as sub-Saharan Africa. Practitioners will need to hone in on the supply chain information that is decision-useful in a sea of available data and dashboards and will need to reconsider which data they need to commission and how it is collected. Today’s audit and remediation processes will hardly be fit for purpose to support responsible factory closures or retraining programs, and therefore supply chain leaders planning for the impact of automation will need to guide their teams from a focus on corrective action plans toward leading a sustainable transition in partnership with their suppliers. Enhanced transparency will support supply chain leaders in the case that global trade is transformed by political shifts toward economic nationalism and will be valuable should free trade continue. Likewise, improving the quality and scope of supply chain disclosure will enable practitioners to stand ready should regulatory requirements increase and to weather the increased stakeholder scrutiny that is the likely corollary of a weaker regulatory environment. Hello! Just want to let you know that we use cookies on this website in order to measure our site's performance, help keep you logged in, and to understand our visitors interests a little better. Please see our for more information