Special technology report
Special Technology Report Supply Chain Management
The linked effect
Manufacturing & Logistics IT spoke with a number of prominent spokespeople within the Supply Chain Management vendor community about the current key trends and talking points within this vibrant technology vertical.
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any of today’s best Supply Chain Management (SCM) solutions offer a raft of functionality benefits; including Sales & Operations
Planning/Integrated Business Planning, Business Intelligence (BI) and Demand Planning & Forecasting. In recent times many of the leading solutions providers on the market have fine-tuned and enhanced the way their systems can be integrated within the wider IT infrastructure of their end customer. There is also Cloud and Software as a Service (SaaS) to consider, and what the benefits or pitfalls might be for users considering these adoption models. And what of the effect mobile technology is having, and will continue to have, on the SCM space? These are just some of the issues and questions that we put to our guest vendor spokespeople, whose opinions and reflections make up this special report.
Dan Turner, chief technology officer
For Dan Turner, chief technology officer at
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MANUFACTURING &LOGISTICS
IT October 2011
ByBox, the current trends the company is seeing are about providing increased visibility and then allowing a wider range of actions as a result. “It’s Business Intelligence but on steroids,” he quipped. “For example, customers not only want to know everywhere they’re holding stock (including, for example, repairers and engineers) but then they want to be able to do something with it; like picking and shipping a good repaired part directly from repairer to engineer rather than shipping from repairer to warehouse first or, even worse, buying a new one. The benefits are the
“
We love to engage in blue- sky thinking and rapid R&D prototyping but we’ll only do any of this in conjunction with customers as they’re clearly the ones who best know where value can be added.”
classic time and money arguments – this doesn’t seem to have changed much.” Turner continued: “We see the wider availability of real-time data as having driven a lot of these new requirements. We love to engage in blue- sky thinking and rapid R&D prototyping but we’ll only do any of this in conjunction with customers as they’re clearly the ones who best know where value can be added.”
Karin Bursa, vice president of marketing, – Dan Turner, ByBox.
Logility, believes it important for vendors to go beyond what a typical ERP or SCM solution offers in order to leverage optimisation across the functional areas of the supply chain. This, she maintains, is one of the top considerations today. “Companies need to optimally plan inventory across a multi- echelon supply chain,” she said. “However most only address finished goods at a specific distribution centre with limited visibility of inventory throughout their network.” Additionally, Bursa considers that the ability to evaluate multiple supply and
productions scenarios to determine which plan best meets the needs of the business – while meeting corporate objectives such as least cost or highest margin, customer priority, etc. – is paramount.
Greater control and visibility
Bursa adds that companies want greater control and visibility across their entire supply
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