The wake-up call

CPR organisations should brace for future disruptions with a resilient supply chain

The COVID pandemic hit the supply chains of consumer products and retail organisations with seismic force. Organisations must face the fact that in the new normal, this sort of volatility is bound to reoccur, be it through natural calamities, geo-political issues, or more pandemics. The question is, are they ready?

To understand the challenges that organisations face and how they are responding, for the latest report from the Capgemini Research Institute – The wake-up call: Building supply chain resilience in consumer products and retail for a post-COVID world – we launched a survey of more than 400 executives from CPR organisations across eleven countries.

We found that COVID has had a massive impact on consumer demand patterns and supply chains, with 85% of consumer products companies and 88% of retailers facing disruptions and dramatically shifting the trend towards ecommerce. This has forced many CPR companies to rethink their supply chains. In fact, 66% of organisations foresee significant changes to their supply chain strategy in the next three years.

In light of this disruption, organisations should realign supply chain strategy, adapting new ways to handle disruptions and assess supply chain resilience for visibility through demand sensing and control towers, agility, diversification, and contingency planning. They should also industrialise automation across the entire supply chain, including warehouses and stores. Finally, they should overhaul last-mile delivery to ride through disruptions through optimised store network, flexible workforce policies, and collaborative models.

We don’t know what the future holds, but we do know it will be volatile. To thrive in it, CPR firms have to be resilient. For more information on building supply chain resilience in the CPR industry, download the report. Most importantly, be well and focus on what matters to you.