We’ve said it before: shifting to being a project-based company is crucial to future-proof your business in an increasingly VUCA world. Today, aioneers co-founder Dr. Adrian Reisch speaks with Christian Schumacher of MT Aerospace and dives into how they managed their digital transformation while balancing core business and simultaneously branching out into new fields, enabling innovation with a solid digital infrastructure.

With data becoming the key to any organization's progress, the necessity for improving its quality and consistency, too, has turned imperative. This necessity led to the genesis of Master Data, which encapsulates the core of business information. It includes structural and hierarchical references needed for a specific enterprise and is easily shareable. In the absence of Master Data, one cannot do any business in present times. If excelled at Master Data effectively, companies can see a direct impact on boosted sales, reduced risk management, and improved profitability.

Today’s internal complexity article concludes the insight into the eight root causes of the supply chain performance gap. Internal complexity means complexity resulting from inside the company such as organizational structure, type of organization, number and types of processes, internal and external interfaces, corporate culture, business activities (e.g., product and service development), and mergers and acquisitions. The good news is that internal complexity can be directly influenced and reduced through different actions, from executive decisions on business and corporate structure to processes, personnel, and products.

Our planet and its people face the greatest challenge in history – climate catastrophe. The demands placed upon natural resources by businesses and their supply chains are a huge factor in causing climate change; that's why we know supply chasins have to become more sustainable. Finding ecological balance in our supply chains is now vital to avoid destroying our environment beyond repair.

In today's globalized world, regulatory complexity is one of the root causes to lacking supply chain performance. This article presents the sixth of eight root causes we defined for supply chains lagging behind their potential. You will find an overview of all root causes in the first post of our ten-part series. For more details, jump to the related article. 

Today, we give you an insight into our 5th root cause: the complexity of supplier network. In the previous articles, we already addressed the root causes of product portfolio complexity, speed of innovation, new types of competition, and multi-channel sales complexity.

The complexity of supply networks is determined by the diversity of supplier relationships and their changes over time. The main drivers for the diversity of the network are the number of suppliers involved and the topology of the network, which is expressed in the number of levels, the degree of networking, and the types of relationships. Examples of supplier relationships are direct material suppliers, logistics services providers, contract manufacturers, engineering contractors, equipment vendors, and professional services providers. In addition to the structural complexity, the geographical location and thus political and social structures have an additional influence on the complexity of the supplier network.

This article will analyze the complexity resulting from the coexistence of several different sales channels. It is precisely this complexity that continues to be the cause of supply chain performance issues. As a basis, you can check the previous articles from the 10-part series about the root causes of the supply chain performance gap that started with a summary and headed right to the root causes - product portfolio complexity, speed of innovation, and new types of competition.

Supply chain performance is a measurable indicator based on turnover, costs, and capital employed. We have identified 8 root causes for supply chains lagging behind their performance that we are happy to share with you in a series of articles. Today we will dive deeper into the one cause with the biggest impact on your supply chain performance: product portfolio complexity.

The 8 root causes we have identified are:

• Product portfolio complexity
• Speed of innovation
• New types of competition
• Multi-channel sales complexity
•  The complexity of supplier network
• Regulatory complexity
• Sustainable requirements
• Internal complexity

Increased levels of customization and particularization of every capability have made their way into all forms of business and production. The supply chain has not been able to stay out of this domain of reorganization, and as a result, supply chain segmentation is a hot topic.

This week, we're taking a look at Complexity: the third concept in the VUCA framework. In this sense, a complex world means a world where you deal with many interconnected parts and variables, and large amounts of information need to be processed to make sense of all aspects and their influence.