IDC’s Manufacturing Insights has just released their top 10 predictions for 2008 as documented here. Amongst the predictions, IDC notes:

• IT organizations will accelerate spending on collaborative decision environments and incubate multi-enterprise business networks
• IT spending in the supply chain area will focus on fulfillment execution

These are interesting insights. I continue to see that as companies have created ever more globally distributed fulfillment networks and supply chains, the need to collaborate on decisions has increased substantially. The drivers behind this is increasing demand volatility and global competition combined with ever shortening product lifecycles. These drivers are creating an environment of constant change, which is placing a premium on organizations ability to collaboratively respond.

The fulfillment execution insight is also right on the mark with what I’ve been seeing as I talk to large brand owners and manufacturers. At the end of the day, the battle is to ensure that you have the right product at the right place at the right time. Sounds easy, but given the drivers mentioned above, its increasingly challenging to do this. But as companies move to become more demand-driven in an effort to proactively manage these drivers, they come to realize that you need to build into your processes the flexibility and responsiveness to deal with the circumstances as they unfold. While efforts to improve demand planning and supply planning provide incremental improvements, breakthroughs are being realized by those companies that figure out how to respond when things aren’t going according to plan - which is increasingly the case.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 4th, 2008 at 9:09 am and is filed under Collaboration, Demand management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.