Agility Matters — getting connected to suppliers right when you need them

If the world’s troubles this year have taught businesses and their supply chain anything, it’s that having the agility to respond is one of the most crucial skills an organisation can possess. And it isn’t only the coronavirus pandemic that has brought the importance of this talent to the fore — we need it in response to evolving regulations, changing consumer expectations and extreme weather events for example. In fact, anything that has the power to shake our business word upside-down. A meaningful response requires flexible and fast prowess, but with precision.

That’s the key. When the cheetah hones in on its life-saving meal, it needs agility, it needs lightning speed, but it needs precision. Without that, it won’t fulfill its objective. For organisations, having the agility to adapt, and do so with speed, can mean survival in changing times, but without precision these efforts cannot achieve their target. But what is that target? We believe it’s a resilient supply chain.

If we cannot hone in on our most important asset, our suppliers, then business will be lost. We need to be able to connect quickly and precisely with our source of, not only, success, but innovation in times of difficulty.

To clarify some of the essential points about connecting with suppliers, we have brought together a couple of experts to engage in a Q&A on supplier connectivity to help us understand how we create, and why we need, supplier resilience.

Hamish McKechnie-Sharma is an Associate Partner, Consultancy, UK from multinational professional services network Ernst & Young. One of his areas of focus has been to lead supply chain operations teams to help them bring about collaboration that will fortify and future-proof the business. Importantly, he has experience of doing this across many industries and many regions, including Europe, Australia, India and the US.

Tony Harris is Global VP Network Solutions at SAP Procurement. He has a history of fostering ethical, sustainable and risk-mitigated business relationships that will promote innovation, increase revenue and reduce costs.

Hamish and Tony will combine their experience and knowledge to share their advice on:

• How we really work towards developing a resilient supply chain and why that matters
• How we build connections within our supplier base
• How that helps pinpoint supplier risk
• How you can go deeper into your supply chain to protect your relationship from future exposure to disruption

All of this is the premise to:

• Reducing risk and satisfying customers
• Mitigating and avoid disruptions
• Optimising cost to be a core responsibility

The discussion will be moderated by our own Jenny Draper, general manager for Spend Matters Europe, who will probe for frank and first-hand intelligence on just how the age of procurement is changing, the direction it is taking, how we must adapt and flex to respond to that change, and how our moves must be more strategic and exact if we are to make a visible contribution to business growth — today’s expectation from most organisations.

We hope you can join us for what will be an open and informative discussion from two professionals who have a proven track record in diving deep into the supply chain, identifying and capturing the opportunities that lie there, and bringing them to the surface precisely where and when they are needed most.

Here are the details:

Register here: Agility Matters. Getting Connected to Suppliers Right When You Need Them

Date: Thursday, November 05, 2020

Time: 10:00 am Greenwich Mean Time, 11.00 am Central European Time

Duration: 1 hour – you may arrive up to 15 minutes in advance, just enough time to pen some thoughts on the questions you’d like answered during our Q&A that will follow the discussion.

We look forward to welcoming you next Thursday.