The Supply Chain Can’t Stop: Wrangling Production Delays at Sites Impacted by COVID-19

These are indeed strange times. Soap is our #1 superhero. We’ve grown weary of the word, unprecedented. Toilet paper has become the most famous supply chain shortage in our lifetime. And suddenly, ‘surge capacity’ and ‘localized supply chain’ are being called ‘secret weapons’ in headline news coverage: see yesterday’s story on 3M by Bloomberg that hit everyone’s Apple Watch as they began their Wednesday.

This is supply chain’s moment if ever there was one.

Yet if you make products and run a supply chain like our customers, there is no time to reflect on this moment. There are too many fires, on too many fronts, that you’re trying to fight due to the COVID-19 crisis. Two weeks ago, it was worrying about how to get your team productively working from home.

Last week it was wrangling material shortages from a key supplier, while also getting hit by shortages in cleaning supplies that almost brought your plant operations to a screeching halt. This week’s challenge: production delays at multiple manufacturing sites has you way behind schedule to fill important customer orders. It’s enough to make you want to stay hunkered down in your house with no human contact — oh wait, we’re already doing that. So now what?

Here is a suggested operating cadence for all the supply chain heroes out there to leverage as you lead through this crisis:

1. Get to a single source of truth to maintain real time transparency of all disruptions and their impact to everyone in the organization
2. Actively manage all resolution tasks, collaborating with internal and external partners to drive quick resolution
3. Establish a daily operational meeting (start of day / end of day) to continually prioritize which disruptions to address first
4. Run a daily or weekly Executive Review meeting to examine highest impact incidents

Armed with a clear operating cadence, you’ll be able to tackle any and all disruptions caused by COVID-19. For the case of the production delay at multiple sites impacted by COVID-19 due to a delayed component delivery, you can get a quick preview of how this disruption could be triaged and resolved using a virtual war room in this 3 minute video:

Elementum is a cloud platform that was designed to help global organizations easily collaborate to track, manage and resolve supply chain exceptions. And in this time of global crisis we’re doing our part by inviting supply chain organizations to use Elementum Essentials at no cost for the rest of this year. Our customer success team stands ready to set up a virtual war room for any organization that needs the extra help. It takes less than an hour to do so, does not impact your IT team, and we promise to have you up and running within 24 hours.

Because #SupplyChainCantStop.

To those unsung supply chain heroes out there, a heartfelt THANK YOU. We are here for you — ready to help.

Nader Mikhail
Founder and CEO | Elementum