Surviving a Supply Chain Crisis — More than Once
A certain level of anxiety set in across the world at the beginning of the pandemic regarding how businesses would survive on a day-to-day basis. Luckily, our business was able to make the necessary adjustments to avoid a crisis and keep our commitments to our customers.
I remember grabbing our Director of Logistics and our IT manager for a meeting. We came up with a contingency plan so we could get our product to customers timely. Daily updates from President Trump and Dr. Fauci and the death toll ticker count were shown on every channel, clouding the urgency of the situation. Something was going to happen. It just wasn’t clear what would happen. Acting fast was imperative — before things got worse.
It was easy to predict that our products would be more in demand than ever in uncertain times. Many companies, big and small, depend on our products to aid them in theft prevention and theft recovery. Unfortunately, places like construction sites and rental equipment companies were forced to abandon locations and job sites and immediately there was a substantial increase in theft.
Our team immediately began to push as much inventory to Amazon as we could using our FBA account. I was fairly certain that Amazon would continue to operate at least more efficiently than we could with a warehouse closure pending. It was only about a week after we pushed a massive amount of inventory to Amazon did we get a notice from Amazon that they were limiting inbound shipments of any “non-essential” items. Our contingency plan for part one was completed just in time. Next, we strategically started to ship products to one of our loyal employees’ homes and even my home. This was so that we could support our customers’ needs. Was it ideal — no — but I was determined along with our team that we would have options!
The last part of the plan was to rely on our long-term manufacturing partners to work with us to ramp up production and fulfillment of our orders. Nothing was more critical in preventing a supply chain crisis than having a long standing relationship with our suppliers where we could avoid shortages. Other competitors and some adjacent vendors started running out of inventory — a fate we did not have to suffer.
It was not long after the pandemic that we suffered yet another supply chain crisis — the semiconductor shortage. We were no longer facing a human workforce shortage, but rather a shortage of critical components inside our devices. The timeline for reestablishing the semiconductor manufacturing and supply chain is still unclear. This is due to a wide range of factors, including the impact of the pandemic, trade wars, factory disasters, and even war.
What can a girl (or a company) do in these situations? Once again, the solution is relatively simple — we have to keep in touch with our suppliers and internal teams every day to keep our options open and our game plan agile. It’s not that simple…but “simply” it is all we can do during uncertain times. We rely on loyalty with long-time partners and diversify offerings where applicable to ensure that our customers can count on us to have what they need — when they need it.
Behind the scenes, our operations team members are preparing for the next supply chain crisis (it will happen — it always does). Our team will strive to be proactive, predictive, and prescription-driven — allowing us to once again be a reliable partner to those companies we serve.
