| |AUGUST 20209FOR COMPANIES THAT OPERATE FROM OR HAVE A BUSINESS RELATIONSHIP WITH CHINA OR OTHER IMPACTED COUNTRIES.· Conduct online workshops to educate the workers re-garding Covid-19 (including symptoms and preventive measures), so that they may be able to work safely. · Make arrangements on the factory premises to screen the employees regularly.· Plan work in staggered shifts to reduce the number of workers present on the factory premises at a single time.· Put all non-essential travel on hold and create a flexi-ble working environment.· Pay close attention to the company's liquidity and devise plans to cut down on all unnecessary expenditures.FOR COMPANIES THAT SOURCE GOODS FROM CHINA AND OTHER IMPACTED COUNTRIES.· Focus on labor planning to ensure you are not out of human resources suddenly.· Focus on Tier 1 supplier risk.· Study your supplier network intricately and highlight areas that might become a source of trouble in the fu-ture.· Diversify your supply chain and reach out to other suppliers in less affected countries.· Work towards making the supply chain more trans-parent and easily traceable. This will give you time to prepare for an oncoming crisis and you wouldn't be blindsided.FOR COMPANIES THAT HAVE A MARKET IN CHINA AND OTHER IMPACTED COUNTRIES FOR THEIR GOODS.· Conduct a study to understand how the demand for your product would be impacted because of the pan-demic. Depending on what you're offering, the demand for your product could increase or decrease. For in-stance, while the demand for luxury items has plum-meted during the lockdown phase, the demand for Fast Moving Consumer Goods has grown manifolds.· Scout alternate channels for selling your product. This pandemic has seen rapid adoption of e-commerce ser-vices as people want to avoid physical contact at the offline stores. An omnichannel approach is the need of the hour and since more and more people are gravitat-ing towards e-commerce, there is no reason for you to not venture into that highly fertile area.· Interact with your customers and reassure them that the goods you are delivering and the methods you are using to deliver and manufacture them are com-pletely safe. People have become highly paranoid and the slightest bit of doubt could steer them away from you. Therefore, interacting with customers could be a savior for your business.· Conduct global scenario planning.THE FUTURE OF SUPPLY CHAINSSince global trade has become so easy, companies have been optimizing the supply chains so that they can reduce the size of their inventories and utilize the assets to the maximum. This has resulted in the disappearance of buf-fers and thus, many companies have lost their ability to deal with supply chain disruptions, and Covid-19 has ex-posed that vulnerability.Thankfully, we are seeing the emergence of new sup-ply chain technologies ­ like the blockchain ­ which offer greater transparency and can warn the companies in ad-vance if a crisis is on the horizon so that they can make adequate arrangements. Not only is this technology a boon for crisis management, but it is can also help mon-itor the quality of material that is being provided by the supplier. In the initial days of the lockdown, China was called out for providing substandard PPE kits and other essential supplies. This problem would be completely re-moved with blockchain as the concerned person would be able to see the product at every stage and identify any fraudulent activities.There are plenty of technologies on the horizon like AI (Artificial Intelligence), ML (Machine Learning), IoT (Internet of Things) that are further going to augment that DSNs (Digital Supply Chains). Hopefully, we'll learn from our mistakes and create a more robust and diversi-fied supply chain network that would be more resilient to future calamities. Since global trade has become so easy, companies have been optimizing the supply chains so that they can reduce the size of their inventories and utilize the assets to the maximum
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