The attendees talked about a "cost of doing business" crisis, where there still isn't enough pace and partnership working between suppliers and retailers, resulting in unnecessary complexity and cost, which is ultimately being passed onto customers.
The leaders interviewed in the research, particularly focused on 5 key themes, which they felt were the priorities to resolve in the next 12 months:
- Mitigation of rocketing costs and fragile material supply;
- solving planning complexity and weakened resilience in supply chains;
- building superior people capability internally and relationships throughout throughout the supply chain ;
- overcoming uncertainty and investment inertia, which is holding back automation; and
- finding end-to-end value creators and ruthlessly removing value destroyers.
Tim Murray, Partner at Newton, spoke to guests at the Forum about the research and shared real examples of where to find and unlock hidden value in the grocery supply chain, including:
- Better alignment between retailers and suppliers in the end-to-end value chain, where we see huge opportunities to drive category growth and bring down costs, by bringing commercial, operations and customer teams together, as multi-disciplinary teams.
- Using customer insight and operational understanding to remove unnecessary complexity and cost from ranges and reduce their carbon footprint as well
- Using applied data science to root out hidden efficiencies in supply chains and networks, with the ever growing use of digital twins and machine learning tools finding new ways to optimise routes and manufacturing sourcing strategies
- Ditching the mindset of "we're already excellent" and looking again at standards/variance and budgets with a fresh pair of eyes, so that preconceived limits of performance are not constraining your ambition
- adopting an 'opportunity led, not market led' approach approach to automation. Understanding the greatest opportunities to deliver ROI from your CapEx and working with the market to deliver those solutions, rather than relying on some of the more basic solutions which are there today.
At the end of the event, Tim said 'I always enjoy these Leadership Forums. With so much change facing the industry it is now imperative to make hose all-important business critical decisions and come together as an industry to debate how to succeed'.
We asked guests what brought them to the event, why the topic is so important and what they see as the biggest opportunity in the supply chain. Find out more in our video:
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There still isn't enough pace and partnership working between suppliers and retailers, resulting in unnecessary complexity and cost, which is ultimately being passed onto customers.
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