Category: Manufacturing Best Practices

Shortages are dominating the headlines. The COVID-19 pandemic brought monumental challenges to the supply chain, culminating in what experts deemed “the perfect storm.” The added pressures of the pandemic overwhelmed manufacturers already struggling with changing market trends and outdated technology. At the beginning of the pandemic, demand was volatile and the shelves were bare. Now consumers around the world are getting used to this new shortage economy. 

But how did we get here? This topic and more were addressed by leading industry experts in “The State of Supply Chain 2022 Webinar” hosted by LeanDNA and The Association for Manufacturing Excellence (AME) in response to the recently published “The State of Supply Chain 2022” report. Below we’ll address the factors that led us to our new shortage economy.

Shortages are the main causes of global supply chain disruptions amidst the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, and they’re proving to be extremely pervasive. While ERP systems and other data categorization tools may help mitigate shortages to an extent, investing in planning or BI tools alone isn’t enough anymore. In the final installment of our shortage series, we move beyond the basics of shortages and the teams that manage them to illustrate why, in today’s economy, manufacturers need to look differently at shortage management.

No manufacturer uses just one tool. Today’s factory operations and procurement teams use a slew of technological tools to analyze the inventory data stored in their ERP systems, guide their daily actions, and navigate the increasingly common global supply chain disruptions. In order to bring their teams out of manual processes and spreadsheets, many companies build their own solutions in-house in order to define and control how they categorize and analyze their data.

Shortages are tricky, even one part can halt an entire production line. Successfully navigating shortages isn’t something one person on one team can tackle alone, they require a wide range of people to manage and eliminate them. Understanding the different roles that are directly involved in shortage management and the part they play is critical to preventing shortages in the future.

Here are three important areas that all manufacturers should be prioritizing and acting on to ensure high levels of supply chain visibility, optimization and efficiency this year.

With bottlenecks in the supply of both goods and services running rampant post-pandemic, the term “shortages” is quite common to hear in the manufacturing industry. But what exactly are shortages and why are they such a big deal?