Accenture’s Technology Vision 2021 Survey focuses on supply chain stress

Eager to avoid a repeat of the challenges of 2020, supply chain leaders are looking to technology to build greater relevance to customers, stronger resilience to disruptions, and enhanced responsibility to society and the planet.

New findings from Accenture’s Technology Vision 2021, based on responses from more than 600 supply chain leaders, demonstrate that 81% of executives said the pandemic has been their organization’s largest stress test. In fact, the same number agree they’re facing technological changes at unprecedented speed and scale.

The report explores key trends and priorities for supply chain executives, including:

• Harnessing the Power of Digital Twins with mirror world simulations, providing enterprises the freedom to explore new ideas and ask limitless “what-if” questions in a risk-free, digital environment;
• Democratizing Technology through tools like natural language processing, low-code platforms, robotic process automation to put powerful capabilities into the hands of people all across the business;
• Reimagining Partnerships and Multiparty Systems to ensure companies have the opportunity to avoid the same mistakes of the past and craft a new path forward using multiparty systems, enabling shared data infrastructure between individuals and organizations that drive efficiency and build new business and revenue models; 

Kris Timmermans, who leads Accenture’s Supply Chain & Operations practice said in an interview that supply chain executives believe technology is now strategically important to their businesses and they’re facing technological changes at an unprecedented speed and scale.

“As they look to digitize their supply chains, they’re seeing how technology can further infuse into their supply chains greater customer relevance, stronger resilience and even enhanced responsibility to business, society and the planet, while still being cost efficient,” he says.

He adds that the findings around cloud were especially compelling.

“Cloud is now the top-priority technology for supply chain executives, cited by 42%. Nearly all (93%) supply chain executives expect 50% or more of their business to be in the cloud in the next three years,” says Timmermans

“In addition to driving speed, agility, scale and visibility, cloud plays a key role in social and environmental sustainability and responsibility. Using cloud-native architectures and sustainable software engineering can reduce carbon emissions by 5-10% each – making a greener technology stack overall.”

Key Points:

• Democratized technology can help close the skills gap. While highly technical skillsets remain in demand, leaders can use democratized technology to cultivate much of what they need within their current workforce;
• To activate a grassroots layer of innovation, enterprises need to train their people to think like technologists. Training programs must cover how to use various democratized tools as well as overall technology literacy; and 
• Democratization is breaking down traditional divisions between the technology and business sides of the organization. Leaders will need to rethink the roles of their IT and non-IT workers and reimagine how they collaborate.