Global trade and supply chains start shoring up on resilience.
We need to know more about who is involved and what is going on at all points in the supply chain process. Digitization is key to helping us achieve this level of transparency.
There is already a distinct line that divides time before the COVID-19 pandemic and two years after it started. It is the line where COVID exposed our fragility, not only as a species vulnerable to disease but as a global culture reliant on a complex web of interactions.
We want to lessen that fragility going forward, both to better protect ourselves against new viruses and to strengthen our global infrastructure, making it is less vulnerable to any new crisis that comes along.
The pandemic highlighted that global trade and supply chains are the place to start shoring up our resilience. Before COVID-19, few consumers gave much thought to the global manufacturing and delivery system that brought them the goods on store shelves, at gas pumps, or stocked in hospitals and pharmacies.
Shortages of key medical goods early in the pandemic, followed by supply chain issues that have persisted across a range of items ever since, have left everyone hyper-aware of the importance of that key global system. Multiple problems facing people in their daily lives are being explained by “supply chain issues.
It is clear that supply chains need to be the focus for any serious climate change alleviation. But other globally important issues need to be addressed through supply chains too. Better run and more transparent supply chains will help guarantee that unfair labor practices are weeded out of the global trading system, that gender equity exists in the workplace, and that poverty reduction is a side effect of growth.
All of this is possible and attainable. Improving supply chains is the first step in getting it done and the first step in that improvement is better knowledge about how they work.
Many supply chains stretch to small suppliers who “often do not have sustainability expertise or resources, and they may be unaware of accepted social and environmental practices and regulations. They are also frequently located in countries where such regulations are nonexistent, lax, or not enforced at all,” noted a study on environmental and social standards within supply chains by Verónica H. Villena and Dennis A. Gioia in the Harvard Business Review in 2020.
Transparency is key to improving supply chains. We need to know more about who is involved and what is going on at all points in the process. That is why digitalization is so important. Shift trade and supply chains into the digital world, away from the ponderous process of paper documentation that exists now, and you have a system that can be better measured, monitored and regulated.
Digitalization will transform trade and supply chains but it won’t be an easy task. Industry and regulators need to agree on common systems and practices, governments need to upgrade or alter laws that now insist on trade deals being tracked by a paper trail, and tools like distributed ledger technology for transactions and QR codes rich in information about traded products need to become normalized.
Problems in supply chains have brought them into the public discussion. Those of us involved in trade and supply chains need to demonstrate that supply chains can and should be the focus for solutions, not just for temporary delays and shortages, but for some of the biggest problems we face.
