The COVID-19 pandemic has had a profound impact on businesses globally. Overnight, organisations were forced to adapt the way they operate to respond to evolving demand and supply requirements.
For many enterprises within the retail, consumer packaged goods (CPG), and manufacturing sectors, this meant needing to quickly adjust their supply chains to cater to changes in the types and quantity of products being bought by consumers, and actually ensuring they were available, as well as changes in overall purchasing habits with a huge shift to online retailing.
To gain a better understanding of these challenges and how COVID-19 worsened existing problems, InterSystems surveyed more than 700 business leaders within retail, CPG, and manufacturing organisations globally.
The survey showed that the pandemic has worsened the technology specific supply chain challenges for 76% of retail, CPG and manufacturing organisations.
Other challenges highlighted include:
- Difficulty performing analytics to support the business
- A lack of accurate end-to-end visibility and reporting, and manual processes which require data manipulation and corrections.
- Data silos and difficulty integrating and normalising disparate data as well as the lack of access to current data.
Could COVID-19 Be the Catalyst For Change Within the Industry?
With so much riding on gaining the ability to optimise processes, increase efficiencies, and accurately forecast demand, retail, CPG, and manufacturing organisations need to put the data strategy and solutions in place that enable them to eliminate data silos, streamline their existing infrastructure, and change and adapt processes as required.