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Many supply chain leaders within the $25T product economy are already using Elementum to manage their COVID-19 response. According to Kelly Bengston, SVP of Global Sourcing & Chief Procurement Officer at Starbucks Coffee Company, “Starbucks is finding it effective to centrally manage operational incidents through Elementum. I know who on my team is accountable for managing them; and I know exactly what to tell customers and stakeholders. This is especially helpful as partners are working remotely.”
Industries will be grappling with a myriad of short and long term challenges as a result of the extreme supply and demand shock caused by COVID-19 globally. Immediate challenges around demand spikes for commodities such as toilet paper, cleaning supplies and gloves have taken center stage. However, longer term supply shock ripples are likely to be felt for the next 12 months or more as production delays at impacted sites, material shortages and scarcity of logistics space come to light. For instance, a recent survey by the Institute for Supply Management found that nearly 75% of companies report supply chain disruptions in some capacity due to coronavirus-related transportation restrictions. In addition, 57% of US companies are experiencing an average of 2x longer lead times for components sourced from their tier-1 suppliers in China. This does not begin to quantify the impact from their “invisible” lower-tier suppliers who they do not deal with directly, as highlighted in a recent Harvard Business Review article.
“At Elementum, it has always been our mission to be a strong, socially responsible supply chain partner. We have witnessed the tenacity of supply chain teams as they work around the clock to triage countless disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic,” said Nader MIkhail, CEO of Elementum. “We are honored to help all those unsung supply chain heroes who can now use Elementum Essentials for free to run their ‘virtual war room’ and resolve issues up to 10x faster,” he continued.
As the leading supply chain incident management platform, Elementum was designed to help global organizations easily collaborate to track, manage and resolve the inevitable supply chain exceptions that arise every day. Historically, teams managed these exceptions via spreadsheets, emails and phone calls. This manual approach provided them little visibility to trends around regional hot spots or root cause that could help optimize operations. Now with the added scale of disruptions from an unprecedented global crisis like COVID-19, it is more critical than ever for organizations to systematically manage supply chain exceptions in a single source of truth so there is clear accountability and real-time visibility to exactly what is happening on a particular issue.