Posts Tagged ‘supply chain management software’

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I found a good article here at Supply Chain Management Review discussing the current and future state of supply chain management software.  The article includes lots of insights from leading experts in the industry.

The article states that Joe Francis, executive director of technology for the Supply Chain Council in Washington, D.C., sees that global supply chain visibility has come to the forefront for many companies. “Global visibility is the best practice that everyone wants right now,” says Francis. “Bad events are so disruptive that we’re starting to see much more emphasis on track-and-trace and predictive events control.”

I agree - but would also add that bad events are coming in large numbers.  The problem that most companies struggle with is the fact that most bad events “just happen” and there’s no system to help them understand which events are going to have a negative consequence to the business going forward.  Supply chain management professionals need to ask themselves:

• How soon can we capture unexpected change in the business?
• How soon do we understand the resulting anticipated risk of an unexpected change?
• How soon will we know which people are responsible for pre-empting the risk?  How soon will they know?
• How do people know how their risk trade-off’s affect others?

The trap that I think a lot of companies fall into is believing that supply chain visibility is the end goal.  It isn’t.  You have to go beyond visibility and understand what problems you’re trying to solve and what tools you need to solve them.  You need to work backwards from the end game.  Supply chain visibility absolutely will be a core element of a solution, but it is not the end game since visibility alone isn’t going to solve most of the problems.  You need ensure that your supply chain professionals have the tools to answer the questions above and take the right actions.