There is a very good article entitled “Planning the factory of the future“ at IndustryWeek that highlights the three essential trends that are the driving forces behind tomorrow’s factories – globalization of the supply chain, increasing product complexity, and changing demand patterns.  These trends are working in combination to challenge supply chain management with global operations, multiple partners, complex processes and products, short product lifecycles and demanding consumers.   This requires integration, on a global basis, between functions and entities like never before.  Adaptability and flexibility become key as you try to navigate the NPI process and a high-mix manufacturing model as the consumer market wants ever more choices. 

While I believe companies are becoming wise to the need for a different approach to supply chain management, the technology to enable this change is the fundamental stumbling block.  While traditional supply chain planning (SCP) solutions have made tremendous strides in improving planning, the “real world” challenges of highly volatile demand, shorter product life cycles, unexpected supply disruptions and complex outsourcing & supplier relationships are driving rapid change and increased complexity in supply chain operations. The result is that today’s enterprise applications are often out-of-sync with reality and can’t support the level of agility that companies need  today or in the future.  This is actually the theme of one of our recent white papers “Why you need to re-evaluate your approach to supply chain planning.”    The paper highlights the key capabilities that a “factory of the future” needs (including enterprise-wide supply chain visibility, alerting, what-if analysis and scorecarding.)

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Tags: Supply chain management, Supply chain planning
Posted in Supply chain management
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