Business View Magazine Feb 2023

76 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE VOLUME 10, ISSUE 2 supply chain planning and execution, improving visibility for customers and giving them more power over what they buy and when — information that is crucial up the supply chain. Finally, advances in predictive and prescriptive analytics, big data, algorithms, and robotics will have broad- reaching effects on all organizations wishing to achieve a more agile, resilient supply chain. Critical in both the plan and source phases of supply chain management, resilience will continue to be a focus over the next year. According to the ASCM Supply Chain Dictionary, resilience is the ability to return to a position of equilibrium after experiencing an event that causes operational results to deviate from expectations. Furthermore, resilience is improved by either strategically increasing the number of response options or decreasing the time to execute those options. Resilience has been top-of-mind for a while: Businesses reacted to the disruption initially caused by the pandemic by quickly pivoting to producing alternative goods, finding new vendors, or increasing prices to keep up with rising costs and more demand. With the effects of the pandemic still ricocheting around the world, businesses are looking to shorten their supply chains even more to prevent disruption by political unrest, climate crises, or worker shortages. One way networks are reacting to ongoing change is by focusing on onshoring or nearshoring: By collaborating with increasingly local vendors, businesses discover the many benefits of manufacturing and producing their products closer to the end customer. And the certainty of obtaining goods and meeting customer demands in the shortest amount of time tends to outweigh any inherent cost increases related to more transparent business practices. For instance, the Lego Group, the ubiquitous toy brick producer based in Denmark, is building a new factory in the United States, with the goal of shortening lead times for production. The company already has factories all over the globe,