On-demand supply chain management: hype?
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I found this post on the SCM Community at the IT Toolbox site talking about on-demand supply chain management solutions. In particular, the author wonders if this is all just the latest hype. I posted a comment there that I’ve included here as well.
** My comment **
The reason I’m hearing large manufacturers get excited about on-demand supply chain management solutions is because they are struggling with IT pressures. These pressures are pushing IT to do more with less and they view, accurately so, an on-demand service as easier to deploy and manage over the long-term. You are absolutely correct in your comments about the importance of data. The move to outsource much of the manufacturing has complicated this further because much of the data now resides outside the OEM/brand owner itself.
As a disclaimer, I work for an on-demand supply chain management service provider and we legitimately are seeing a strong growing interest in our on-demand service. In fact, many prospects have told us the fact that we are on-demand is a key differentiator/advantage in their eyes. On the data front, we actually provide tools (including alerts) to proactively identify and notify you of data anomalies. Many of our customers actually leverage our solution to clean up their data while they focus on the main benefit of solving a variety of supply chain problems.
