“Strategic decisions will need to be made about when companies should try to ramp their production back up again – will it be in two or three or four weeks? Everybody is confronted by what is happening now, especially how we can find backup suppliers for the critical elements of their supply chain, but at some point, we have to look forward.”
As we run this podcast, the entire world is consumed with the fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic. Procurement teams have been hit directly in the form of uncertain supply chains and unstable suppliers. While we are naturally consumed with short term risk mitigation, at some point, we will emerge from this crisis. What will our companies face then?
Christian Heinrich is one of the industry professionals splitting his time between the short term and the longer-term view. He is the Co-Founder of scoutbee.com and a Professor of Digital Transformation at Quadriga Hochschule Berlin.
Christian took some time out to share with us what he is seeing on the ground. What tactics and strategies are they taking and how are they starting to scope and plan out the actions they need to take today to prepare for a return to some kind of normalcy once the pandemic is contained.
In this conversation, Christian tells Host Philip Ideson
[6:55] What he sees procurement organizations focused on in the short term to minimize the impact of disruptions and uncertainty
[12:31] The risk that enterprise technology has posed for collaboration between a company and its suppliers to this point
[20:49] Whether (and when) procurement will return to discussions of digital transformation and value chain ROI
