Given your role, this raises some challenging questions for you. Is your newly expanded supply chain up to the job of supporting your business growth? Does it have the right skills in the right places to compete effectively on a global basis? If it doesn’t, how will you build those skills quickly, consistently and cost-effectively? Beyond these immediate challenges, there are also longer-term demands on the horizon. Irrespective of the economic conditions, you need to drive ongoing optimization of your end-to-end supply chain and improve planning and forecasting. Your business will also have to integrate and boost skills levels across its key supply chain-related operations, including procurement, logistics and sustainability. If these challenges sound familiar to you, then you are not alone. During the past two years, the global supply chains that expanded rapidly during the boom years have become stretched under the impact of efficiency and cost initiatives. Having managed the effects of widespread destocking, they now face the contrasting challenge of concerted replenishment. How well supply chains perform under these pressures will be critical to businesses’ success in an increasingly complex and competitive environment. Traditionally, organizations tended to invest in technology and processes to boost supply chain performance. But in recent years, leading companies have also recognized the vital role that people play in driving innovation in their supply chain and — more broadly — improving their ability to produce results.