T&M Associates’ localization program helps our clients develop, grow, diversify, and optimize their supply chains, and our clients have seen the benefit of their resilient supply chain ecosystems during the pandemic. Supply chain disruptions, such as those caused by the pandemic, war, or the 2008 financial crisis, have exposed the vulnerabilities and critical pinch points of global supply chains. During these events, companies experienced difficulties obtaining materials, especially from offshore suppliers, delivery times increased, quality decreased, and many suppliers went out of business. Companies had to weather the impact of shut-downs, slow-downs, and labor shortages of their lean supply. Additional disruptions were caused by logistics, from availability and cost of shipping containers to disruptions at receiving or shipping ports, … These events have encouraged companies and governments to promote supply chain redundancies and resiliency. However, digitization and data analytics are just one part of the solution and increasing the buffer capacity by maintaining large inventories is a short-term solution. The risk of maintaining large inventories is that once the logistics issues ease, there may be global overcapacity. The cost of maintaining large inventories or other supply chain redundancies may make the products too expensive in the long term. This raises the questions: how can industries or supply chains be made more resilient and/ or how can we grow sustainable supply chain ecosystems?
T&M Associates has developed a Value Addition/local content framework to help our clients develop, grow, diversify, and optimize their supply chains. Our programs are supported by proprietary systems and processes designed to meet the needs of our clients. Digitization and data analytics are just one part of this framework; they are tools used to provide information to make business decisions. By themselves, data analytics do not grow supply chain ecosystems. The output of our program provides clients with a portfolio of opportunities and a list of activities targeting short-, mid- and long-term development and investment opportunities.
“We have seen a lot of plants and factories and suppliers that support Saudi Aramco from Europe, including China and other places – they had to shut down because of the lockdown. That impacted us for a while. But because of the optimum level of inventory that we have and because of our in-Kingdom total value add, which is our local content – we are at 56% so a lot of things are being manufactured in the Kingdom – it helped us a lot.” Quote by Saudi Aramco CEO Amin Nasser in Oil&Gas, June 2020.
Over the last decade, T&M Associates developed and executed the leading in-country value addition program, recognized by the IFC and World Petroleum Council Excellence Awards in Social Responsibility and especially our clients. Our programs are sustainable and continue long after our participation ends. Our programs have developed hundreds of supply chain ecosystems to support our clients’ industries, generated billions in new revenue for local companies, created 1000’s of new jobs, and 10’s of millions of USD in new investment.