CEOs are working hard to hunt revenue growth while resetting or rebuilding their businesses for a new reality. Digital investment, including supply chain digital transformation, can help them return to growth quickly and effectively. Introducing new digital products – including e-commerce and digitally enabled products (subscription-based, pay as you go) – has the highest returns of digital transformation tactics they have tried. Future markets will belong to digitally enhanced versions of today’s products, or complete digital substitutes.

Supply chain leaders will have to accelerate supply chain digital transformation, thoroughly revisiting their supply chain operating model to support new digital business models and digital products. 

Over the last couple of years, CEOs have placed greater focus than ever on financial matters, including profitability, cost management, efficiency, and productivity. Many expected an economic slowdown in 2020, even before COVID-19 arrived. This priority is likely to gain more attention as companies recover from the harsh effects of the COVID-19 crisis.

Supply chain is often the go-to function where CEOs turn to optimize their company’s costs. Supply chain leaders should be prepared with ideas for how supply chain digital transformation can optimize their supply chains while protecting the supply chain from linear cost cutting.

The majority of supply chain leaders are pointing to three technology opportunities to optimize supply chain costs:

• Robotic process automation (RPA) to automate repetitive supply chain processes such as order management or supply contract management
• Advanced analytics to improve and automate supply chain decision making across several areas of the supply chain
• Collaborative/smart robots to further automate operations across factories, warehouses, and distribution centers

Business agility has been a priority for many organizations over the last couple of years. However, many talked about it and few have made progress. Those that did make progress fared much better during the COVID-19 crisis. For all others, the crisis unveiled supply chain capability gaps that supply chain leaders are now urged to cover. 

Agility brings speed, responsiveness, adaptability, and resilience in supply networks and operations—all more important now than ever. Supply chain leaders can leverage supply chain digital transformation to build agile supply chains that sense and respond to unanticipated changes in demand or supply, quickly and reliably, without sacrificing cost or quality. Emerging digital innovations like AI, advanced analytics, big data/data lakes, and the Internet of Things support a more transparent, automated, intelligent, and orchestrated end-to-end supply chain.