Greg Brady founded One Network Enterprises in 2002. Before that, he led i2 Technologies to high growth and market leadership for seven years, both as CEO and head of worldwide operations. Previously, Brady was vice president of worldwide applications marketing for Oracle and held positions at J.D. Edwards and at McCormack and Dodge.
Today I want to give you the four key questions you should ask your next supply chain management vendor. Last year Gartner reported that companies that implemented demand-driven value networks grew revenue faster, achieved more than 15 percent higher perfect-order rates, and reduced levels by as much as a one-third when compared to their peers with traditional, cost-focused value chains.
Supply chains today are dysfunctional. Each member uses discrete enterprise systems with little or no ability to communicate with any other systems (even those within the same company). If you don’t believe me, take the coordination quiz. This lack of upstream and downstream visibility typically means that retailers have little idea what conditions manufacturing plants are facing at a particular time, and vice versa. Given this state of affairs, is it any wonder that 70 percent of global executives surveyed by McKinsey see increased supply chain risk over the next few years?
The software as a service (SaaS) model has definitely entered the market as an important trend, but how do SaaS models impact supply chain management?
Why aren’t more companies demand-driven? I had an eye opening discussion with the SVP of supply chain management at a multi-billion dollar company the other day, and together we tallied up the number of systems under his watch. In less than 5 minutes we came up with over 20! I thought it would be an interesting exercise to turn our discussion into a “Coordination Quiz”.
As I discussed in my last post, “From Vertical to Virtual Integration”, over the past 25 years or so, supply chains have become far more complex and dispersed, and technology has struggled to keep up. Lack of upstream and downstream visibility and lack of control are reoccurring complaints that I hear from companies across industries, including Retail, CPG, Automotive, Logistics, Hi-Tech, and the Military.
People grasp the benefits of putting their supply chain in the cloud, and as a result, software vendors are scrambling to offer cloud computing SCM software.
Think for moment about the amount of technological change we’ve all experienced in the last 25 years. I once listened to music with a clunky eight-track player. Now I have Spotify, which lets me instantly stream nearly any song from the cloud for free. I once booked trips with a travel agent, manually entered business contacts into a Rolodex, and physically carried important documents on a floppy disc.