Two years into the pandemic, questions about supply chain security still linger. How can product companies be proactive to ensure success? Peter Bilello, President and CEO of CIMdata, encourages asking more questions to find the right answer.
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“The good news is that the pandemic brought a challenge and the opposite side of a challenge is an opportunity. Hopefully companies will see this challenge and ask ‘what can I do about it so I can minimize the next disruption?’”
Bilello recently spoke with Propel CMO Dario Ambrosini on The Platform Rules: Digital Transformation for Product Companies. Even in a temporary crisis, Billelo strongly recommends shifting perspective towards the long-term.
“A lot of our clients are coming to us and saying “we know we have to change the way we think about these things. In order to build resilience, they need to 1) figure out what they're trying to accomplish, and then 2) step back, figure out the big picture.”
"Hopefully companies will see this challenge and ask ‘what can I do about it so I can minimize the next disruption?’”
A new perspective calls for asking serious questions. Throughout the episode Billelo emphasizes what companies should consider as they try to stabilize their supply chain management:
- What do you really want to focus on as your core competency, and what are the things that you're going to contract out?
- If, all of a sudden, I change what I produce or what I sell, how does that ripple down the supply chain?
- How much tolerance of risk can I deal with? How can I engineer for that?
- Think about the life cycle: what do I buy? Who do I buy it from? How do I deal with it?
- What are the bottlenecks? How do I then manage against that bottleneck?
According to Billelo, it’s time to come at things from a new angle.
“We teach MBAs it’s all about the money, and we don’t teach them holistically the understanding that it's about life cycle optimization. I'm talking about the management of the whole and how to optimize it as a whole, because ultimately I want to bring the right products to the right market, the right time, the right cost. The only way I'm going to do that is to have an end-to-end perspective of it.“
