Your procurement team is under intense stress as global supply chain organizations work to respond to the COVID-19 crisis. Supply chains are being disrupted, widespread shortages are impeding production, and your buyers are bogged down with daily firefighting. Many manufacturers have reworked their factory staff structures to include multiple smaller shift teams throughout the day. On top of that, the rapid transition to remote-work arrangements for much of your team and day-to-day work becomes even more challenging.
These unexpected changes to structures, routines, and facetime not only amplify an already stressful situation but also make it harder to know which urgent issues to tackle first and who’s accountable for what. As your entire business focuses on taking the most critical actions to retain customers, you need to find ways to quickly recreate some of that missing structure and routine and to enable communication across your distributed team. Our white paper “5 Best Practices for Managing Inventory Operations in Remote-Working and Distributed Teams” introduces some best practices your team can adopt to better manage inventory operations when everyone can’t meet face-to-face:
- Prioritize and simplify daily work for your buying team
- Monitor results to identify which buyers need more support
- Manage accountability with task ownership and clear timelines
- Standardize agendas and reports used in virtual meetings
- Share resources to help everyone act quickly to keep production moving