BUILDING A 'JUST IN CASE' SUPPLY CHAIN

INDIA HAS AN INCREDIBLE OPPORTUNITY TO DEFINE THE DIGITAL SUPPLY-CHAIN STANDARDS FOR A NEW WORLD ORDER

- ROHIT BHAYANA

Our Covid-19 vaccine shot is no less a supply-chain miracle than it is a medical one — moving billions of vials around the world, in the right ambient conditions, with complete track-and-trace, and the ability to match the ‘arm to the vial-code’.

The other facets are even more pervasive. From home delivery of food and medicines to how industries operate, supply chains are everywhere. Omni-channel and directto-consumer (D2C) are not just channel diversification strategies, but make-or-break choices to work around constraints imposed by lockdowns upon lockdowns and mitigate ever-increasing geopolitical and environmental risks.

The next generation of supply-chain is thus a two-part formulation. The first is to create a resilient supply chain as part of a national agenda, and it needs to be tackled as such on various levels from infrastructure to policy to derisking. The second part is creating an agile supply-chain innovation stack that enables velocity, and this comes from digital-, financial-, and information-based supplychains.

The first part, thus, is the foundation, which is a government agenda. And though, as a nation, we are terribly delayed on this front, the good news is that there are global benchmarks we can adopt without many variations. The second part not only has fewer parallels but is something the whole world is also learning anew. This is where India has an incredible opportunity. We can define digital supplychain standards not only for ourselves but for a world order where ‘just-in-case’ is more critical than ‘just-in-time.’ If we get this right, we will create an economy that has a resilient and dynamic supply chain. This is the next generation of supply chains and will be fueled by three objectives: visibility, variabilisation and trust.