A Design Thinking View Of Responsive Supply Chains During Crisis

SUMMARY

Customer is looking for a ‘hole in the wall’ and not necessarily interested in your state-of-the-art drilling machine

Fewer companies have understood the job-to-be-done better than Ola Cabs

The traditional way of supply chain management has two distinct, clearly identifiable stages of planning and execution

As the world is waking up to the painful reality of human vulnerability in the face of ‘act of God’, we need more holistic, responsive thinking. Globally, supply chains are getting strained. To begin with, the supply chains of food, medicines, equipment and the protective gear, and then for everything else. Supply chains would define how quickly and with minimal damage would economies and societies revive themselves and get to the (new) normalcy.The traditional supply chains were designed with a product, or mostly a commodity, in mind, while the new reality insists on delivering an experience and not just a branded commodity.Understanding the job to be done, versus products to be delivered is the first step towards developing customer-centricity, notwithstanding the sheer difficulty it presents because most supply chain professionals view customers as cold data, and this needs to change.While Ola may have copied Uber, it seems that today Uber can’t copy Ola, especially with the way Ola is expanding its offerings, much in view of what all customer jobs to be done– travel, entertainment while travelling, travelling outstations, travelling cheap, travelling in groups and you name it.This, of course, calls for iteration, but more importantly mandates an entirely new way of looking at your customers, not as consumers of your offerings, but an offeror of problems worth solving.Nothing beats first-hand insight, and only when you solve the problem with the customer that you understand the pain points and possible solutions.An iterative thinking comes along with an experimental, prototype-oriented mindset, where learning takes precedence over correctness and one is encouraged to fail cheaper.

Supply chains have come a long way, from the relic of the backend to right and centre in a customer-centric economy. The boundaries between B2B and B2C industries are blurring as rapidly as the chasm between products and services. Products are fast getting consumed as services, and services as experiences and the customer doesn’t shy away from paying a premium for that extra care, the extra intangible, which is, though hard to measure, remains as a huge wellspring of differentiation.