AMR has produced its list of 2008 supply chain predictions, as reported here at SupplyChainDigest.  Included in the list are:

• Companies manage risk for business continuity and competitive advantage.  Response Management is all about supply chain risk management on a day-to-day basis.  I’ve written about this many times (see here, here and here) in the past.  The reality is that things are changing so fast today that companies need to be empowered to “manage at the moment” and to respond quickly and accurately to changing conditions as they happen.  If you can’t, someone else will and it’s going to impact both your top and bottom lines as they steal market share and/or your only response is one that is inefficient and costly.
• S&OP technologies – not just processes – take center stage.  This is very much a growth area that we’re seeing, but not in the way that you might expect.  S&OP is a planning process.  And, while companies are looking to improve their planning processes, the bigger challenge is at an operational level.  How exactly do you execute to the plan coming out of this process when everything (demand, supply and product) is changing at an increasing rate?  This is the challenge we see companies focused on.  This is very much an issue of empowering people with the tools for risk tradeoff and response so they can deal with the daily exceptions that are reality.
• What-if analysis and simulation-based tools see growing adoption.  Another area that I’ve written quite a bit about in the past (see here, here and here).  In an environment of constant change, people need to be able to understand the impact of a proposed change and to quickly create options for solving the unexpected problem.  They need to do this in an iterative and collaborative fashion - without impacting the real operations of the company before determining the best action to take.  This is where what-if analysis and simulations come in.  They provide the tools necessary to address these situations.  To work, they need to be multi-user to support the collaboration that the response process requires and they need to be easy enough to use that broad user communities can contribute.  Why?  Because when it comes to dealing with unexpected events, you need to tap into the human capital within the company to make the right tradeoffs and decisions to respond appropriately.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 4th, 2008 at 10:58 am and is filed under Collaboration, Risk 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.