What are some specific impacts of supply chain issues over the past year?

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My background is all supply chain. In terms of supply chain management, almost every company is still trying to figure out what they want to be when they grow up. I'm seeing a lot more companies get their first chief supply officer. More companies are now looking at technology as a way to address labor shortages and examine their internal processes to see what is causing the problem. Many are still looking for ways to be resilient, whether through restructuring their contracts, or diversifying their suppliers. In China, if there's one worker that tests positive for COVID, everything is shut down. People migrated to Vietnam, but then those plants were shut down as well.

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When you hear the news, people say “supply chain” like it's one thing. It always annoys me when people discuss blockchain in the same way. Supply chains move differently. Even the business news media will put an artificial buff in front of it, but there are multiple supply chains that have different impacts on us as organizations and how we do business. You may have a physical hardware component to your product, and you can't provide the service without having that hardware. But if there was a power or internet outage, you might have a problem from a service perspective, even if you have the hardware to deliver the service. There are so many interconnected things, and people don't talk about that enough when the word “supply chain” comes up.

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My partners and customers feel the effects whenever we have a shortage of edge devices because it's a requirement for our SD-WAN solution. But we have a hardware group that deals with that, and our main supplier for our edge devices was Dell until we had a spinoff from them. I believe we're not changing that in terms of who we use as suppliers, but we are no longer a Dell company.

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We have been impacted by the supply chains issues. Some of the SD-WAN/firewall models were not available and had to switch to a different model, some server products were not available or were fully decommissioned/made an end of life, and we needed to look for different HCI solutions, some were just delayed, it varies from vendor to vendor and from product to product.

Some minor inconveniences that we've encountered were the need to change the headset vendor as the one we used for many years could not deliver equipment for several months.

Fortunetely we did not need to change the servers and firewall vendors.

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Supply chain issues forced companies to make short-term decisions regarding their purchasing of products based on availability as opposed to best fit. Supplier evaluation and consolidation will be a great opportunity for companies to address the cost creep that occurred now that material/product availability issues have settled.

What are some specific impacts of supply chain issues over the past year?

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