The 5 Digital Supply Chain Challenges Every Business Should - Forbes Natural disasters you can plan for, like hurricanes. Several years ago I spent a week at a new Chinese factory of a major American industrial-equipment company. But only 2 percent can make the same claim about suppliers in the third tier and beyond. For the foreseeable future, they will face pressure to increase domestic production, grow employment in their home countries, reduce their dependence on risky sources, and rethink strategies of lean inventories and just-in-time replenishment, which can be crippling when material shortages arise. The purpose of this study was to identify and exhibit the interrelationships among COVID-19's impacts on supply chain activities. By contrast, only 22 percent of automotive, aerospace, and defense players had regionalized production, even though more than three-quarters of them prioritized this approach in their answers to the 2020 survey. Specific categories to consider include the following: A crisis may increase or decrease demand for particular products, making the estimation of realistic final-customer demand harder and more important. Almost 90 percent of respondents told us that they expect to pursue some degree of regionalization during the next three years, and 100 percent of respondents from both the healthcare and the engineering, construction, and infrastructure sectors said the approach was relevant to their sector. Processes and tools created during the crisis-management period should be codified into formal documentation, and the nerve center should become a permanent fixture to monitor supply-chain vulnerabilities continuously and reliably. While current indices report conditions at the time of the survey, the future indices report expectations about conditions in six months. COVID-19 How COVID-19 Affects Farmers and the Food Supply Chain COVID-19 has highlighted weaknesses and inequities in America's food supply system, as well as the need to fix them by Monica Jimenez April 27, 2020 Tags: COVID-19 , Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy Estimating a medtech companys degree of connectiveness helped it expand its supplier base by 600 percent, while an industrial-tools maker identified request-for-qualifications-ready suppliers for highly complex parts that it had been previously unable to source. The Administration has established a Supply Chain Disruptions Task Force to monitor and address short-term supply issues. A case in point is the U.S. groceries market, where companies had difficulty adjusting to the plunge in demand from restaurants and cafeterias and the rise in consumer demand. Even with the support of government incentives, it took 20 years for the country to build a local base capable of supplying the vast majority of electronic components, auto parts, chemicals, and drug ingredients needed for domestic manufacturing. How much are consumers willing to pay? The public sector can play a valuable role in reducing these costs by facilitating short-term adjustments and by addressing vulnerabilities in U.S. supply chains. For example, Exhibit 3 shows how a digitally enabled clustering of potential suppliers shows the capabilities they have in common. Finally, when coming out of the crisis, companies and governments should take a complete look at their supply-chain vulnerabilities and the shocks that could expose them much as the coronavirus has.