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Post-Pandemic Changes: Onshoring Supply Chains & Marketplace Globalisation

DAN SULLIVAN

There’s a great and permanent shifting of supply chains from Asia to the Western Hemisphere for American markets. After all, with ports on the Atlantic, Pacific, and Gulf of Mexico, shipping north from south of the U.S. border is much more reliable.

Strategic Coach clients in Guatemala and Colombia with big textile companies used to market heavily to attract clients. Recently, however, clients have been coming to them. Now, they just need to keep up with demand.

During the pandemic, we experienced quite the wake-up call.

There were massive supply chain shortages in Asia, which impacted everything from computer chips to fabrics. As Peter Diamandis reflected in our recent conversation on the Exponential Wisdom podcast, “We can’t have our future in the hands of supply chains we don’t own.”

When it comes to onshoring supply chains, I believe we will need to re-engineer:

  1.   The leveraging of low-cost labour south of the U.S. border.
  2.   Scaling with high-skill, robot-enabled AI in the central U.S.

The central U.S. has the world’s best agricultural land and internal transportation, including the Mississippi River, the railroad system, the interstate highway system, and an intricate and organised air transport system.

Seeing problems as opportunities.

As entrepreneurs, we see the COVID manufacturing supply chain problems as opportunities. And the opportunities that have arisen include discovering offshore labour and supply solutions in Central America, additive manufacturing to create closed-cycle supply chains, and improving transport and human-robot collaboration.

An exponential multiplier of the last three years, for example, is the application of AI for lab testing, where you can do 10,000 digital comparative tests in the same period as you could do a few manually years ago. There’s also cutting-edge technology for regenerative medicine and age reversal.

There are massive, creative, and fundamental transformations in human history happening in the world today, all because entrepreneurs see opportunities in age-old problems that we never challenged before.

Talent acquisition in the age of COVID.

At Strategic Coach, it took us three days to go completely virtual because we already communicated through Zoom with our team of 120 in three countries across five locations.

We look at travel very differently now that it’s no longer required to do business, and we look at talent acquisition differently now that location isn’t a factor.

Peter believes the metaverse will impact talent acquisition and the way we collaborate, as he sees a future where sitting in virtual meeting rooms with AI support will soon be the norm. It’s already happening in online gaming—the biggest sport in the world—where even kids are making hefty incomes through prize money, new inventions, and games.

Today, entrepreneurs can find talent at any budget because we have access to people in countries where living costs are low. In addition, the way we communicate and collaborate is improving as technology evolves.

The globalisation of the marketplace.

As we’re onshoring supply chains post-pandemic, we’re increasingly offshoring cognitive assets, talent, and customers. This is opening up the globalisation of the marketplace.

Today, products and services can be bought and sold virtually. And people love it! Consumers and businesses have access to a worldwide marketplace, and we’re not limited by what’s in proximity.

The future of marketplace globalisation.

If your supply chain relies on overseas collaboration, look for opportunities to onshore your supply chain. If you’re a manufacturer, there will be a lot of competition that will supply your onshore materials, finished products, and so on. There will be great opportunity to create an onshore capability no matter where you are.

For talent, explore globally. You can get five to ten times the value creation with geographic arbitrage for certain jobs.

Finally, every company needs to think about going global with their customer base to adjust and adapt to these times of globalisation. Naturally, incentives and painful lessons—like supply chain disruptions from Asia, quarantines, and limitations to in-person business—have already helped surface industry evolutions.

Because of the global pandemic, onshore supply chains are becoming more efficient, and talent and customer pools are exponentially larger. Visit the Strategic Coach Resource Hub to maximise your opportunities and get continued support as an entrepreneur in these exciting times.

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