Covid crisis shifts supply chain management from efficiency to resilience

Looked at on a world scale, the Covid-19 pandemic will continue to deliver shocks to global supply chains for some time to come. Even if the public health crisis abates in the UK, our economy is part of a global economy, and UK corporate IT will have its work cut out in supporting companies as they are forced to re-forge supply chains, perhaps over and over again, and at short notice. The crisis has provoked some rethinking of how the world economy ought to work, with an emphasis on the desirability of a shift from efficiency – doing things "just in time" – to resilience – building in more slack. The FT's Rana Faroohar provides an account of such rethinking in an article entitled From'just in time' to'just in case' published earlier this year. In the discussions which lie behind this article there are different emphases on a spectrum of opinion: some say we can have both efficiency and resilience equally, others that there is a choice to be made for one or the other, and yet others say it's a matter of balance, of trading off. Tony Harris, global vice-president of business network solutions at SAP, says it has to be a combination. "You wouldn't want to move to a resilient network or supply chain that wasn't also efficient," he says.