Countless retailers, e-commerce sites, warehouses and manufacturers are experiencing temporary shutdowns, regional closures or delays in order completion and time-to-deliver thanks to COVID-19. For many of these businesses, especially e-commerce sites and warehouses, recent closures and delays are not the result of an unavailable workforce. Rather, businesses are having trouble shifting the supply chain’s flow of goods to meet new consumer demands.
This, coupled with the widespread unavailability of certain products (from essential items like toilet paper and fresh meat products, to non-essentials like computer hardware), demonstrates a lack of end-to-end visibility throughout the supply chain — meaning critical business processes such as order to cash, procure to pay, and load tender to invoice are not seamless, and therefore at risk.
Impact of COVID-19 on the Retail Industry & Supply Chains
Businesses that have implemented automation and remote/cloud access control to critical business applications that handle these processes will be able to manage their critical operations in the face of workforce shortages and a lack of on-site personnel during the pandemic. Unfortunately, many companies have yet to automate the mission-critical integration processes that could prepare them for crisis situations like this and are still relying on manual integration processes. If their workers cannot be physically present, their company’s productivity suffers.
Before the pandemic, sifting through bureaucratic red tape, tariffs and trade agreements was a challenge for many businesses. Now, as suppliers and various trading partners are curbing or halting production at a moment’s notice, retailers are forced to onboard new partners and suppliers just as fast.
In order to stay in business, retail companies that rely on suppliers and partners in areas that have been particularly hard-hit by the pandemic must quickly onboard new partners to fill in the supply chain gaps caused by shutdowns and low availability.
How Will Retailers Know They’re Equipped to Weather the Pandemic?
Over half of supply chain-driven companies state they don’t possess a preferable degree of end-to-end transaction process visibility. In addition, nearly half of IT professionals claim it takes at least one month to onboard a new trading partner. This isn’t because the onboarding process must be slow. Instead, the process can be very quick if automated integrations are enabled.
Retailers and their supply chain partners who possess modern ecosystem-driven integration capabilities, with native templates and connectors to reduce onboarding times, will be able to circumvent the manual processes required for partner integrations — reducing onboarding time to as little as a few hours.
