A Consumer’s Perspective on Complicated Supply Chain Disruption

The Breakdown in Supply has been Impressive, but So has the Effort to Rebuild the Systems

By Mark Scheer, Founder Scheer Branding

I have been providing executive level marketing consultation to firms for nearly thirty years, and during that tenure have had the pleasure of working with companies in a broad swath of industries. I bring value to my clients by quickly understanding their business and offering tactical and strategic counsel on how to achieve their goals from a marketing and branding perspective.

While onboarding for this current engagement with SCMO2 more than four years ago, I was shamelessly dumped into the inner workings of the supply chain world and faced one of the more challenging learning curves of my career.

It’s not that I struggled to understand the concept—I have had plenty of involvement with supply-side manufacturers. And while the industry’s ‘alphabet soup’ can be overwhelming, I am well-seasoned in digesting acronyms. Rather, the challenge came from being exposed to just how truly complex supply chains have become, and the myriad tasks, processes and calculations that are involved in feeding the algorithms that drive the whole machine.

Enter the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020.

Everyone knows the toilet paper jokes. Then food began disappearing from the shelves and disinfecting wipes are still nowhere to be found. The disappearance of these consumer ‘commodities’ was likely the first exposure to supply chain disruption for most of the general public. During my four years of working with SCMO2, the standard supply/demand implications for a lean producer seems fairly obvious to me.

In June, my family bought me a new bicycle for Father’s Day. It’s now mid-September and I still don’t actually have that bike. My wife is on the list at four local bike shops and checks regularly at the big-box sporting goods stores. This anecdote for me is where the disruption to the global supply chain really becomes, well, real.

The interdependence of EVERYTHING in our globally integrated manufacturing base has really become one unbelievably and incomprehensibly massive single system. It’s not toilet paper and hot dogs and bicycles. It’s the workers who can’t get toilet paper and hot dogs being unable to get to work to make sprockets that are sold to the assemblers who are building the bicycle. One company’s demand is another company’s supply, which is short because their demand is not getting fulfilled from another supplier who’s demand is subsequently not getting met. And so on.

Never before in the history of humankind has the “butterfly flapping it’s wings in China” analogy actually been more true. The inability of a company to produce the smallest electronic sensor can ripple through so many phases of supply/demand impact that, when multiplied 1000s of times over, it’s humbling to see how the Single Global Supply Chain (as I unilaterally choose to call it) really governs our lives.

My slightly elevated understanding of how armies of analysts employ sophisticated supply chain platforms like SAP allows me to truly appreciate not only the scope of the current challenge, but just how hard these systems are being reconfigured and retooled with new data and processes to bring the balance back. And observing SCMO2 in action, working with businesses to implement the tools to elevate visibility, planning and collaboration more effectively has been equally impressive.

I don’t think the average consumer will ever be able to understand that. It’s a truly significant undertaking that I believe will pay dividends to our fully integrated global manufacturing apparatus for decades to come. In the meantime, as the system continues to correct itself, better get your patio heaters now. We thought ahead and bought ours in August.