In a world where disruptions are the new normal, companies can no longer afford to treat supply chain management as an afterthought. The pandemic laid bare the vulnerabilities of traditional supply chains—delays, inefficiencies, and an inability to respond to real-time challenges. Now, more than ever, businesses need a digital-first approach to build resilience, agility, and efficiency.
To that extent, Prof. Debjit Roy, a distinguished professor from the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIM-A), has launched a cutting-edge online course titled “Supply Chain Digitization: Strategy and Design” on Coursera. Supply Chain Digitization: Strategy and Design is not just another course—it’s a roadmap to future-proofing supply chains in an unpredictable world.
E-commerce has brought tremendous convenience into the hands of the customer, who can choose from an array of products and services and get them rapidly delivered at a convenient location. While supply chains have evolved to offer substantial value to the customers, the expectations from the supply chains have also grown significantly.
Today, supply chains are not only expected to perform on common dimensions such as speed, cost, and quality but are also expected to fulfil the orders in a sustainable, responsible, and flexible manner. Transparency and traceability of products in the whole supply chains have become a necessity. Numerous disruption events from the recent past, such as COVID-19, Suez Canal blockage, and geopolitical challenges have underscored the importance of robust supply chains and the need for transparency in the whole chain.
The case for Digitization
How do you scale and design high-performing supply chains? For decades, supply chains have operated in silos, relying on outdated processes that lack coordination and real-time visibility. But today, technology offers an unparalleled opportunity to align supply chain strategy with process design, ensuring businesses can respond dynamically to customer needs and market fluctuations. AI-driven insights, real-time analytics, and automation are not just buzzwords—they are critical tools in reducing inefficiencies, bridging demand-supply mismatches, and creating a seamless flow of goods and information across the supply chain.
Digitization is a massive force that can enable you to accomplish the same. You need a supply chain strategy to align with your customer needs, but you also need a good design to operationalize. You need a vision, but you also need robust processes that align well with the strategy. Not just that, you need enablers that can link strategy with design, which are digital tools.
Today, digitization of supply chain processes along with powerful technologies such as IoT and blockchain can break the performance trade-offs and offer more value to the customer along with higher profits to the stakeholders. This course is for supply chain professionals who want to derive value from the digitization wave. In particular, the course uses case examples from multiple organizations such as L’Oréal, Heineken, TetraPak, and DHL that have already embraced supply chain digital transformation, using technologies such as IoT, AI, digital twins, and automation to optimize operations.
Where should a company begin the digitization journey? How can supply chain mapping uncover opportunities for transformation? The course will deliberate on questions such as, how did L’Oréal sense customer demand? How did Heineken manage their global operations? How did TetraPak make their operations sustainable? How did DHL improve their warehouse productivity? Then the course dives into the key functional areas in supply chain processes such as procurement, manufacturing, storage, and distribution (via trucking and shipping) to showcase the value of leveraging supply chain technologies and digitization.
Finally, the course dives into how to create a business case for supply chain digitization.
Learning objectives
● To understand how digitization tools can enable the alignment of supply chain strategy with process design.
● To design connected supply chain with better information flow and minimize the mismatch between demand and supply of products.
● Using mapping techniques to uncover digitization opportunities in the supply chain and unlock value for customers.
● To enhance supply chain performance with digitization at different nodes and justify investments in the fulfillment chain.
This course is unique because it allows the participant to reflect upon a firm’s supply chain strategy and its link with appropriate design (both fulfillment nodes such as manufacturing and warehousing and modes of transport such as shipping and trucking). Finally, it allows the participant to draw their own supply chain digital transformation canvas. The conceptual tools at appropriate places allow them to understand how to analyze the performance trade-offs, choose the right tools, and decipher the mechanism that will enable them to decide the path to digitization.
