How best-in-class organisations are making best use of bimodal supply chain strategy

Ultimately supply chain (SC) managers are the links between supply and demand, and consequently very much responsible for both SC response and financial performance. On top of the habitual suspects they are usually being measured by — service performance, order-to-delivery time, product cost and inventory investment — they have had to struggle with controversial trade-offs since their roles first existed. This battle became even more difficult to deal with when incorporating today’s new levers and trends, social and environmental pressures or a broad variety of alternatives for SC digitalisation. This paper will review how this new landscape has changed, making it extremely difficult to orchestrate, what new drivers and capability focus SCM needs to develop and how, due to the nature and the playground of those tradeoffs, a bimodal management philosophy is a must. The paper concludes with a practical case example that demonstrates the robustness of such an approach. We expect to validate the underlying foundation for sustainably managing future scenarios in a disruptive world and leverage the role of the supply chain in the business not only as a cost centre, but also as a differentiating capability to better compete in the market — a bimodal perspective.