Gillian Tett is a well known journalist for Financial Times. She predicted the 2008 crisis . And she wrote many books. One of her books, „The silo effect” is describing very well what we want and what our mission is, although the word supply chain is not even mentioned in the book. And want we want, what is our mission? We want to demolish the silos, building bridges between separate departments and business partners.

For more than 20 years- this is our experience in Supply Chain- we intend to bring at the same table , in the same talk, having common objectives and goals, all departments , all suppliers and all clients. For sure, communication is keen in all we want- but we do that through specific processes which eventually will become indispensable for a company, just like mobile phones, if we speck about last 20 years, or washing the hands if we speck about these days(so much needed in these dangerous times). One of main target of the S&OP, for instance, is exactly that: destroy the „walls”.

And talking about Covid 19, many of the existing issues are linked with Supply Chain : drop of demand and excess of offer for some (just think about hotels) , increased demand and drop of offer for others (just think about PPE). Overall, we arrived here because states , organizations and companies built walls and decreased visibility instead of accepting total cooperation. This is the silo effect in action.

However, silos are needed. They help us keeping the crops inside and protect them from bad weather. They helped us in decreasing the impact from Covid-19, by restricting the people movements and virus spreading. The main issue is: for how long a silo is good before becoming a stopper. The Supply Chain process is about that, it helps help us finding the answer.