Kinaxis has just published a new white paper entitled “Four Essential Requirements for Today’s Supply Chain Management Solutions.” An abstract for the paper follows:

The continued downward pressure on IT budgets combined with the shifting dynamics of today’s supply chains has created an environment ideally suited to be addressed by on-demand service offerings. With the right capabilities, on-demand solutions for supply chain management can offer a unique combination of tangible benefits to IT (costs savings and low IT resource requirements) as well as to the business (sophisticated computing solutions designed to excel within today’s global and collaborative supply chains).

There was a recent post at Sandhill.com on a similar theme. The post, entitled SaaS reinvents the supply chain, suggests that “high-tech companies need to take advantage of SaaS-model benefits for real-time visibility into their supply chain—especially in tight economic times.” The post goes on to describe some of the business challenges and describes the unique benefits that on-demand (or SaaS) solutions have in meeting those challenges – starting with supply chain visibility.

I would argue, though, that this is not at all unique to high-tech companies. While high-tech companies have certainly been some of the first and most aggressive global supply chain outsources, they are no longer alone in this regard. Today, companies in all industries – from aerospace & defense to industrial and automotive – have globally outsourced supply networks. They too share the same challenges of seeing into their widely dispersed network of partners and of orchestrating the intricate cooperation and coordination necessary for these sophisticated networks to work efficiently and effectively. And, with the pace of change and volatility on the rise, their challenge continues to grow.

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Tags: On-demand (SaaS), Supply chain visibility
Posted in On-demand (SaaS)
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