Thanks to the power of technology, global businesses have never been so interconnected. But with COVID-19 causing unprecedented disruption to global supply chains, cracks are starting to show, where organisations are now looking to trim their workforce, cancel projects and withdraw their earnings guidance for the current FY.
“This disruption is across industry sectors and challenges will emerge in how organisations reconfigure their business and resourcing models to work through this environment and come out swinging!” says Ashok Menon, managing partner and co-founder of Relae Group.
“There is no avoiding the fact that, traditional measures will work only to a certain point, after that it becomes a bit of an unknown territory. The ability to navigate the next 6 to 12 months and stay afloat will be challenging for most seasoned leaders”, says Evan Hayes, co-founder of Relae Group.
“With the current buying behaviour, when local supply of the underlying raw materials dries up, people tend to look at alternative sources, changes to existing product/service offerings and a reconfiguration of the supply chain becomes unavoidable.”
Changes in consumer demand, a reduced workforce, adapting to new processes and ways of working become considerations in the reconfiguration. Now may be a good time to think quickly, reset your expectations and reconfigure your business and operating model to drive forward.
“While it may sound counter intuitive, look to invest in the new way forward and work with ecosystem partners that help you scale up and down as you wish to establish your approach to the new paradigm, like buying functional expertise as a service and making it outcome based as opposed to paying and not knowing what you are going to get, or paying for down time when you are haemorrhaging cash.”
It is important that we “roll with the punches”– doing nothing is not an option. But what if there was a way to not only deal with the problem at hand – but to also reconfigure your business to be in a stronger position in 12-18 months’ time?
Microservices address both the current and future needs of businesses to allow them to scale up and down as required and build capability ongoing. Configuring your business in more of a “modular” fashion for certain repeated activities or entire job functions – allows seamless handover to an external consultant or resource without a “set up or step down” cost.
This disruptive plug and play microservices approach is developed by Relae Group across Procurement, Supply Chain and Product Development, in working with GPRO (a subsidiary of Maersk) and Krinati Solutions, a disruptive eSourcing start up utilising principles of jugaad (non-conventional frugal innovation), design thinking and structured thinking
We don’t know what tomorrow will bring, how the emergency laws and provisions will affect our day-to-day lives or how long they will be in effect. What we do know – is that having the ability to reduce your overheads during tough times and scale up quickly to take advantage of opportunities at hand will be the most successful formula to thrive in the new normal.
Relae works with a variety of people from business owners to board members, CEOs and CFOs, Functional Leaders, providing advisory and execution services on areas of procurement, supply chain and product development focussing on improving revenues, reducing costs and improving people capability.
To find out more about Relae Group, click here.
