Digital Transformation of Supply Chain Planning

A couple of years back, IBM released a study “Digital operations transform the physical” (capitalization theirs).

Citing client examples the report states,

“Perpetual planning enables more accurate demand and supply knowledge, as well as more accurate production and assembly status that can lower processing and inventory costs . . .

Analytics + real-time signals = perpetual planning to optimize supply chain flows“

They are describing the space to which manufacturers, retailers, distributors, and even service providers (like say, health care delivery) need to move rapidly with value network planning.  This is a challenging opportunity for software providers, and the race is on to enable this in a scalable way.  The leading software providers must rapidly achieve the following:

1)      Critical mass by industry

2)      Custody of all the necessary data and flows necessary for informing decision-makers of dynamic, timely updates of relevant information in an immediately comprehensible context

3)      Fast, relevant, predictive and prescriptive insights that leverage up-to-the-minute information

Some solution provider (or perhaps a few, segmented by industry) is going to own the “extended ERP” (ERP+ or EERP to coin a phrase?) data.  Whoever does that will be able to provide constantly flowing intelligent metrics and decision-support (what IBM has called “perpetual planning”) that all companies of size desperately need.  This means having the ability to improve the management of working capital, optimize value network flows, minimize value network risk, plan for strategic capacity and contingency, and, perhaps most importantly, make decisions that are “in the moment”, spans the entire value network.  That is the real prize here and a growing number of solution providers are starting to turn their vision toward that goal.  Many are starting to converge on this space from different directions – some from inside the enterprise and some from the extra-enterprise space.

The remaining limiting factor for software vendors and their customers aspiring to accomplish this end-to-end, up-to-the-moment insight and analysis remains the completeness and cleanliness of data.  In many cases, too much of this data is just wrong, incomplete, spread across disparate systems, or all of the above.  That is both a threat and an opportunity.  It is a threat because speedily providing metrics, even in the most meaningful visual context is worse than useless if the data used to calculate the metrics are wrong.  An opportunity exists because organizations can now focus on completing, correcting and harmonizing the data that is most essential to the metrics and analysis that matter the most.

What are you doing to achieve this capability for competitive advantage? 

Thanks for stopping by.  I’ll leave you with this thought of my own:

“Ethical corporate behavior comes from hiring ethical people.  Short of that, no amount of rules or focus on the avoidance of penalties will succeed.”

Have a wonderful weekend!