Customer behaviors and expectations are changing dramatically, challenging the established supply chain and operations setups of leading industrial companies. These changes are taking place against the backdrop of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, with digital technologies impacting every aspect of how companies run their businesses — from creating digitally connected products and services to automating data-driven supply chains.
To succeed in this quickly evolving and increasingly digital marketplace, companies need to transform their supply chains. Supply chains are becoming more integrated with multiple value chain partners. They’re becoming not just automated but autonomous — able to act with limited human intervention — and ultimately self-orchestrating. For many companies, improving the supply chain is a vital part of their efforts to become more customer-centric and quickly respond and adapt to changing demands and requirements while maintaining cost efficiencies. Next-level supply chains are also helping to increase product quality by supporting moves to expand portfolios of products and services, and even introduce entirely new business areas.
To take a closer look at how digital champions are transforming linear supply chains into connected and autonomous supply chain ecosystems, ThoughtLab supported PwC by surveying more than 1,600 supply chain executives and decision-makers in 33 countries across the Americas, EMEA, and Asia Pacific. We asked about their key supply chain capabilities, supporting technologies, organizational structures and challenges, as well as the benefits they are seeing from their investments into the supply chain now and their plans for the next five years.
