I can’t take credit for the title.  I’m at the AMR Research “The Business of IT” conference in Boston where we heard from AMR analysts, the CIOs of Merck and IBM and from Karl Braitberg who heads demand management for Cisco.  Karl gets credit for the great quote.

During his discussion, Karl commented that what drives IT investment at Cisco is the need to battle complexity.  In a company that spends $5.2 billion on R&D, you have a very robust product pipeline that creates complexity.  Thus, IT investments are to battle complexity in both IT and the business “before it eats you.”

Cisco’s view is that the right IT investments enable the supply chain team to manage increasing complexity and complexity is a reality today.

Karl described their evaluation criteria and process for recent investments in demand planning, supply-demand balancing (where they selected Kinaxis RapidResponse) and analytical forecasting and data mining.

There were also good discussions about supply chain risk management by several AMR analysts.  One of the key things they pointed to was the fact that too many people look at supply chain risk within the context of their role only – their silo.  Supply chain risk, for example, is not isolated to having a negative impact on the supply chain.  It has a financial impact, can negatively impact customer satisfaction and market share, etc.  Companies need to look at risk more holistically and IT must be an enabler.  Technology is an enabler to compliance, monitoring and managing risk.  And, most risk is at the handoffs between groups and IT uniquely understands these business processes and the associated data.

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Tags: Demand-supply balancing, Supply chain risk management
Posted in Demand management, Supply chain risk management
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