In the post-modern world, with its fast-paced and hectic nature, disruptions to supply chains can cause considerable problems for the world’s enterprise organizations. Goods and components of these products, as well as machinery and equipment, are manufactured in a particular country and shipped to the rest of the world. Multi-national enterprise organizations like Toyota Motor Corporation have vehicle manufacturing plants worldwide, in countries and regions like Japan, Thailand, France, Belgium, Turkey, North and South America, and South Africa. For instance, the new Corolla Cross is manufactured in South Africa, the hybrid system parts are manufactured in one of the Japanese factories, and the engines and transmissions are built in the USA.

All these parts and vehicles are shipped to the rest of the world using supply chain and logistics service providers (LSPS). Now, imagine containers of hybrid system parts destined for South Africa are disrupted, resulting in the South African factory coming to a standstill because these hybrid parts are an integral part of the Corolla Cross. This standstill then has a knock effect because the car sales companies who sell the Corolla Cross do not get delivery of the cars they ordered. Ultimately, customers must wait indefinitely to take delivery of the vehicles.

Disruptions to Supply Chains and Logistics Operations

The two most significant events we have had in recent history are an increase in severe weather events caused by climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic.

Both scientific and anecdotal evidence illustrates the extent to which COVID-19 disrupted the global economy. This disruption was significant across all markets, sectors, government departments, SMEs, and enterprise organizations, especially in the global supply chain and logistics sector.

Countries implemented lockdowns, travel restrictions, and other measures in a desperate attempt to curb the spread of the virus. Consequently, most cross-border shipping activities ground to a halt and remained closed for most of the pandemic. This was especially true of countries with zero-COVID elimination policies, like Hong Kong.

For instance, FedEx, a global freight forwarder, closed its pilot base in Hong Kong due to the pandemic requirements in November 2021 and relocated it to California because there was no clear timeline for when the city would return to normal.

Moreover, climate change and its associated severe weather events have played a catastrophic role in negatively affecting supply chains and logistics operations in the past. Climate change’s impact on this industry is a double-edged sword because shipping goods worldwide via truck, airplane, and ship negatively affects climate change through greenhouse gas production. 

However, this article focuses on the disruptions to supply chains and logistics operations due to severe weather events. For instance, as described above, one of the Toyota manufacturing plants that manufactures the Toyota Corolla Cross and exports it worldwide is in Prospecton, South Africa (just outside Durban, on the East Coast of South Africa).

In April 2022, severe floods hit the Toyota manufacturing plant and the Durban port (the largest shipping terminal in Africa). Toyota suffered extensive damage to its plant, vehicles, production lines, raw materials and components, and equipment. Figures quoted at the time were that Toyota would lose 45,000 production units.

Even though Durban harbor’s port operations were only shut down for about a week, the damage to entry roads, shipping container storage facilities, and shipping containers themselves, as well as the debris in the harbor, was substantial. The South African minister of public enterprises, Pravin Gordhan, told an online briefing (published by Reuters) that it took 72 hours of dredging to clear most of the debris, such as fridges, logs, and other debris that ended up in the harbor during the floods.

The impact on the supply chains and logistics operations out of Durban port was significant. The main road into the harbor was severely damaged, losing 50% of the road width, reducing the road to two from four lanes. Rail infrastructure in and out of the harbor precinct was also damaged, resulting in more trucks on the road and increasing congestion on major arterial roads between the harbor and its clients, such as mines and heavy industry located throughout Southern Africa.

As a result, many Logistics Service Providers were adversely affected across all levels of their operations, putting financial pressure on their owners due to significant financial losses incurred during this time.

Navigating Disruptions with Technology

The good news is that the world’s economy has recovered from the devasting effects of COVID-19, and logistics operations have returned to normal. However, climate models predict an increase in severe weather events because of climate change.

As described in a report by Ernst & Young LLP, senior-level supply chain executives responded to a survey conducted in September 2022 stated that their organizations “plan to shake up their supply chain strategies to become more resilient, sustainable, and collaborative with customer, suppliers, and other stakeholders.”

When asked how they plan to achieve these “shake ups,” the unanimous response was to increase investment in the latest technology, such as Artificial Intelligence and machine learning applications for advanced analytics, robotic process automation, and cloud-native applications.

This view is reiterated in the research paper “Interconnectedness between Supply Chain Resilience, Industry 4.0, and Investment.” The authors of this paper describe how industry and society are in the Fourth Industrial Revolution (Industry 4.0 or 4IR) with an avalanche of advanced technologies well-positioned to harden supply chains and logistics operations.

Increasing Supply Chain Resilience with Kubernetes

The last decade has been marked by the latest paradigm shift in enterprise IT, cloud native computing, giving rise to the development of cloud native applications. When you think of cloud native applications, you’re likely to think of microservices packaged in containers and managed by a container orchestration platform like Kubernetes.

Therefore, let’s examine how to harden supply chains or improve their resilience using Kubernetes to orchestrate cloud native containerized microservices-based applications.

But first:

What is Kubernetes?

The Kubernetes website describes Kubernetes as an “open-source system for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications.”

Note: Kubernetes is the de facto container orchestration platform used throughout the global cloud-native application development industry.

The core function particularly relevant to this discussion is Kubernetes' ability to orchestrate a containerized microservices-based supply chain application. Not only is this approach incredibly cost-effective, but it also improves the supply chain’s robustness and adaptability.

How to Navigate Supply Chain Disruptions with Kubernetes

The best way to expand on this concept is to look at a typical supply chain use case. Imagine you own a supply chain and logistics company, and it’s your responsibility to ensure that the Toyota Corolla Crosses manufactured in South Africa are shipped worldwide. You are also responsible for ensuring that the hybrid system parts manufactured in Japan are sent to the South African manufacturing plant.

Your business has also been hit hard by COVID-19 and the 2022 floods in Durban. Therefore, the question is how to improve your organization’s resilience by successfully navigating supply chain disruptions.

Succinctly stated, improving your organization’s supply chain and logistics operations’ resilience in the wake of historical challenges like COVID-19 and the 2022 floods is imperative for ensuring the continuity and resilience of your supply chain. While it stands to reason that hardening your supply chain operation and improving its resilience encompasses several elements, one of the most important elements is to consider is decoupling your supply chain application software from a monolith to containerized microservices, providing benefits like flexibility, scalability, and resilience. Let’s consider each of these three benefits individually:

1. Scalability

Containerized microservices can be automatically scaled up and down (in and out) depending on the demand for a particular service. For instance, the manufacturing plant’s annual shutdown is from circa 16 December each year for about a month. Therefore, it is not necessary to ship the hybrid system parts from Japan to South Africa during this time.

Therefore, the services that manage the supply chain and logistics operations for these parts do not need to be spun up by Kubernetes, improving resource efficiencies and saving costs. The same principle applies to the consequences of a severe weather event like the 2022 floods highlighted above. Instead of incurring the costs of running a monolithic application where all functions run consistently, asking Kubernetes not to spin up the containers that contain this functionality encapsulated in microservices is simple.

The opposite occurs during peak manufacturing times, where the maximum number of parts must be shipped to South Africa and completed vehicles shipped worldwide. Kubernetes handles this extra load on the supply chain application by scaling the needed functionality to meet the additional load and then scaling down the applicable containers again when the load is lightened.

2. Flexibility and Speed

Deploying each microservice independently from all the other microservices is possible. Therefore, every single microservice does not have to be running to access a particular feature, increasing the application’s speed, and improving its user experience (UX).

A second but equally important benefit of the containerized microservices architecture orchestrated by Kubernetes is software development teams can work on different microservices, speeding up development and reducing bottlenecks.

Thirdly, because each microservice is independent of other microservices, it is possible to upgrade a microservice without affecting the overarching application. When DevOps engineers are sure the microservice is bug-free and operating as it should, it is a simple matter to move it to production.

3. Resilience

An application developed with microservices is more resilient than a monolith. In a microservices architecture, if one service fails, it does not necessarily bring down the entire application, ensuring higher uptime metrics and a better UX. Moreover, it is easier to recover from a catastrophic system breakdown because it is easier to diagnose issues as microservices are independent, ensuring recovery from failures is quicker.

Imagine your supply chain application has a barcode creation function that fails. In a monolithic context, the whole supply chain process breaks down while developers diagnose the problem and develop a fix for it. Not only could this take time, but it also halts the physical movement of goods, which, in turn, impacts all businesses further down the supply chain, delaying product completion, inflicting financial losses on, and reputational damage to, all organizations along the supply chain.

For instance:

Imagine several clients have ordered Toyota Corolla Crosses from the local dealership, with delivery expected in 30 days. They are depending on this delivery date to be met. However, the vehicles are delayed because the supply chain is interrupted due to a faulty barcode generation function.

The net effect is unhappy clients; the dealership loses sales because the clients buy vehicles from another dealership, and Toyota Motor Corporation is branded as unreliable.

Now, imagine your supply chain application is a cloud native app developed using a microservices-based architecture. The same barcode creation function fails, but because it is contained within an individual containerized microservice, the failed microservice is taken out of production, and a new copy of the microservice is put into production, with hardly any downtime, the supply chain is not affected, and the clients receive their vehicles on time.

In Conclusion

Disruptions to supply chain and logistics operations are a given for the foreseeable future. Therefore, it is critical to implement mechanisms to navigate these disruptions.

Leveraging Kubernetes to orchestrate cloud native supply chain applications developed using containerized microservices can (and will) significantly improve the resilience of your organization’s supply chain. This approach ensures high availability, enables rapid failure recovery, and provides the flexibility to adapt quickly and effectively to rapidly changing conditions.