The Logistics of Logistics Overcoming Supply Chain Disruptions with Shanna Greathouse and Tony Nichols
Tony Nichols, Shanna Greathouse, and Joe Lynch discuss overcoming supply chain disruptions. Tony and Shanna work at CarrierDirect, a company that specializes in helping companies minimize supply chain risk.
About Tony NicholsTony Nichols is a Vice President in CarrierDirect's Supply Chain Practice. He has over 25 years of experience across all functions of the supply chain and IT in multiple industries including consumer products, life sciences, and industrial manufacturing. Tony earned a Bachelor of Science in Business from Purdue University.
About Shanna GreathouseShanna Greathouse is a Senior Business Consultant at CarrierDirect. Shanna has experience in a broad range of industries including oil & gas, health tech, and consumer goods. She has led programs ranging from acquisitions to technology deployment with a strong focus on lean manufacturing and data management. Shanna earned a BA and an MBA from Baldwin Wallace University.
About CarrierDirectSince 2011 carriers, 3PLs, shippers, and logistics technology vendors have looked to CarrierDirect to deliver the efficiency, strategy, go-to-market plans, and technology that will elevate their business above their competition. CarrierDirect builds organizations and relationships, providing strategy and technology designed to maximize efficiency, reduce cost, and make your business stand out. CarrierDirect advises clients on the elements of their business most vital to success: strategy, organizational structure, compensation, technology, training, recruiting, workflows, processes, and more. CarrierDirect clients include Werner, J.B. Hunt, Covenant, CRST, and FedEx.
Key Takeaways: Overcoming Supply Chain DisruptionsThe Causes of Supply Chain Disruptions include:
- Pandemics like the COVID 19.
- Natural disasters like forest fires, hurricanes, earthquakes.
- Socio-political events like trade wars and political upheavals around the world.
- Rapid changes in consumer buying habits
The Supply Chain Disruptions Include:
- Manufacturing capacity drops and become less efficient
- Labor shortages and cost increases.
- Raw material shortages and cost increases.
- Financial implications
- Port congestion
- Trucking capacity falls and costs increase.
- Final mile capacity demand increases.
During the podcast interview, Tony and Shanna shared four (4) strategies for avoiding and or minimizing supply chain disruptions
- Flip the forecasting narrative. During unprecedented times, historical forecasting is not useful. Consumption-based forecasting and planning, which is demand-driven and based on consumer and customer consumption short-term patterns, is necessary to ensure customer commitments are realized when supply is constrained. Companies will need to implement solutions that give this data in real-time or in the shortest time possible.
- New partnership opportunities. Distribution center networks have expanded their footprint to allow for more immediacy in stock pulling and decrease time to the consumer. Visibility to data allows companies to work with novel partners including non-historically 3PL partners or competitors to change the distribution network to increase target addressable market and improve last-mile capabilities. More and more companies are looking at building consortiums with other companies to increase capabilities and meet consumer expectations and to be competitive with Amazon and Walmart.
- Unlock the true costs of goods. By understanding the true costs of goods, both direct and indirect expenses including cost of quality, rework, tariffs, expedited air, and safety stock can uncover overlooked sourcing opportunities that enable resilience and flexibility while reducing overall risk.
- Digital Twin/Sandbox. By creating one unified system, a holistic duplicate system or "Digital Twin" can be created to serve as a sandbox for scenario analysis. Running supply chain simulations enable a quantitative approach to assess risk. Resiliency modeling and can address key supply chain issues.
- CarrierDirect recently published a white paper, Data Transparency that contains additional strategies for assessing risk and overcoming supply chain disruptions.