By Mark Morley, Director, Strategic Product Marketing at OpenText

Manufacturers operate complex production processes which are highly dependent on the timely supply of parts from external suppliers.

While the manufacturing sector regularly manages disruption from events such as natural disasters (you only need to go back to earlier this year when bushfires ravaged large parts of Australia), the global spread of Covid-19 has severely impacted material flows and the smooth functioning of production facilities across the globe.

It is fair to say that global supply chains are experiencing levels of disruption not seen before.

According to a recent report from the Institute for Supply Management, 75 per cent of companies are reporting supply chain disruption.

To combat this, manufacturers must look for ways to minimise the impact on operations and improve supply chain resilience.

Flexibility
Organisations that are best positioned to weather these unforeseen circumstances are those who have embraced the cloud. Cloud-based deployments have become essential to managing costs, resources and risk without sacrificing competitive advantage, product innovation or customer satisfaction.

When a manufacturer shifts its data from on-premise to the cloud, it also ensures that all business information can continue to be stored securely and accessed globally.

Collaboration
The key to maintaining business continuity also lies within the collaborative relationships between trading partners. Cloud-based platforms can facilitate effective communication between trading partners which is particularly beneficial when a global disruption such as the one we are seeing now occurs.

Partners can continue to monitor and supervise the execution of dual sourcing strategies and quickly establish the post-disruption condition of a supply chain, providing a significant competitive advantage.

In addition, centralised management of all trading partner contact information provides an opportunity to conduct post-disruption assessment of a manufacturer’s supply chain, which leads to better risk assessment and preventive steps for future disruptions.

Visibility
Global supply chains are comparable to finely tuned machines. When an unexpected incident occurs, the machine’s ability to retain its output may be impacted and can in turn, severely impact the broader end-to-end business ecosystem.

Manufacturers seeking to adapt their operations so they can continuously provide products and services to their customers can pivot towards technologies that provide them with the visibility they need to support rapid decision-making.

These companies can embrace a secure, expanded degree of visibility into their multi-enterprise operations using integrated third-party data sources.

By doing this, manufacturers can self-monitor the availability of critical components that may be affected by unforeseen and ongoing supply chain and operational disruptions.

Insights
Analytics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning technologies can prove to be invaluable during a period of disruption as they provide valuable business insights.

Dashboards can be created to monitor the condition of the business and the associated supply chain, providing decision-makers with information to inform corrective actions.

The capture and analysis of a manufacturer’s data can also generate important insights and lead to greater efficiencies across the business such as improving operational workflows, driving innovation and/or seizing new business opportunities.

Cloud-based platforms
Digital transformation changes the way manufacturers interact with customers, suppliers, assets and partners.

The use of a cloud-based integration platform allows more adaptive supply chains to be introduced which can support shortages and ensure stability; in turn, this can drastically improve a manufacturer’s ability to be flexible and collaborative with its trading partners, maintain visibility into its operations and capitalise on key data insights within its operations.

Manufacturing companies that seize the opportunity of the cloud through its agile and flexible architectures can achieve a competitive advantage and continue to deliver, operate and excel amid a one-off, unforeseen event or extended periods of global disruption.