An RMIT University supply chain expert says companies need strategies to keep their supply chain resilient
A supply chain expert has called for Australia to plan and adopt new strategies that create supply chain resilience and ease the current cost of living pressures.
Professor Vinh Thai is a logistics and supply chain expert at RMIT University and founded the Australian Maritime Logistics Research Network (AMLRN).
He says Australians are struggling with the rapidly rising costs of essential items such as food, fuel and transport and it’s predicted the situation is not going to be improved any time soon.
Thai says one of the factors contributing to the rising cost of living in Australia is global supply chain disruptions where reduced sailings, shortage of empty containers and port congestions have significantly added costs to the supply chain, indirectly increasing costs of food and other commodities.
This is not expected to improve any time soon, given the uncertainty of the ongoing war in Ukraine, skills shortage, congestion in some world’s major ports and unpredictable geopolitical events such as the conflict between China and Taiwan.
Thai says businesses need to build up and enhance their supply chain resilience capability to ensure the costs of transporting essential items aren’t being passed onto Australians. Thai says these businesses’ supply chains should be able to efficiently predict, respond and recover from disruptions.
While the federal government continues to implement the Supply Chain Resilience Initiative with Japan and India (which promotes best practices, investment promotion and buyer-seller matching events for supply chain diversification), Thai says more needs to be done, such as developing a national supply chain resilience strategy.
“The government can further support this by introducing policies which support the development of the national supply chain capability through building key infrastructure (including digital) in logistics, especially maritime logistics, given the maritime dependency of Australian trade,” Thai says.
“On a global scale, governments need to be working together to provide incentives for cross-border supply chain collaboration, especially in the South East Asia region and take a more proactive role in logistics and supply chain manpower development.”