Paradigm shift in Supply Chain – Post Pandemic Era.

Abstract

Many organizations lost its importance and performance during covid period. Supply chain of many
organizations became totally defunct. Even financial supply chain also was not working and finance
got stuck across the world. Now we need to design the supply chain and supply chain network in a new
way. So we can defend any situation in future. In the 1940s and 1950s, the focus was into material
handling in labor intensive operations and making better use of available resource. In 1980 the total
focusshifted in to supply chain management and it’s a sea change in total approach. But after pandemic
the total scenario has been changed and we need to think to design the supply chain network in a totally
new ways. Efficient supply chain management system should be agile, adaptive and can respond to
changes arising out of any situation. Supply chain has got influence on people & society at large. These
are socio-economic issues like local poverty elevation, supplying essentials commodities in emergency
time; marginalization or unemployment issue etc. supply chain could contribute towards to the
development of community & enhancement of the quality of members of community. In global operation
organizations often encounter stiff competition & in order to have competitive pricing, they force
supplier to bring down the cost. It has been noticed that supplies are forced to bring down their cost
and thus they pay lower wages to the people involved in supply chain operations. Why Supply Chain
Management essential for any manufacturing or services organization? SCM helps an organization to
streamline the process. Think about a retail shop. If they implement supply chain management, they can
effectively track their sale -> inventory -> reordering resulting in optimal utilization of resource and
capital. Think about a software product development organization here using SCM; they can optimize
human resource utilization and manage important milestones, resulting in lower risk in budget overrun.
Let's consider a software service organization. They are bidding for a project, and finally, the client
awarded the order to them. Now, what all they need to do? They need to plan for resource planning.
Will they onboard all the resources (solution architect, business analyst, designer, programmer, tester,
deployment team) together? For sure, they will not. Now, there is another challenge. Resources with
different skill sets have different hiring time and different learning curve to become productive. Here
SCM can play a crucial role to prepare an optimal project plan. It can help the software firm decide
when to onboard which type of resource and when they can be released, resulting in optimal budget
management and profitability