Special technology report Supply Chain Management
grow and become more complex it is critical,” she said, “your supply chain software is able to scale and deliver the breadth and depth of functionality required to optimally balance costs and service levels.” Campbell believes the key differentiators are to be found in systems’ ability to deliver on time and on budget, offering local resources while still having a global presence.
Phillips has witnessed that functionality tends to differ “by shade, not by colour”. He commented: “As different vendors focus on different markets, it is more important that they have the deep domain expertise to offer clients. The next step in that evolution has become to offer applications tailored for a given industry (and by ‘industry’ we are not just talking about a vertical as big and generic as ‘manufacturing’ or ‘logistics’ – or even as big as ‘process manufacturing’ but we are looking at specific industries such as bakeries or breweries). By focusing on a given industry – or rather specialising by industry – you can offer a complete application that offers everything a business in that industry will need, but only what it will need. Integrations, configurations, and analytics shouldn't be part of the implementation. They should be part of the application.”
Development roadmap
And with regard to future developments and innovations within the SCM space over the next year or two, Turner believes we will see the professional socialisation of field service start to provide additional benefits and efficiencies as competitors work together to provide more joined-up solutions for customers. “We’re starting to see resources, equipment and knowledge all being shared,” he said, “but we think that technology will start to enable physical network sharing, like cross-carrier shipments, making use of smarter tracking labels and the routing information embedded within them.” Turner also believes that RFID will finally become more highly demanded as smart phones are now being built with NFC on board.
Bursa reflects that the next year or two will 16
MANUFACTURING &LOGISTICS
IT October 2011
see continued evolution of S&OP that is tightly integrated into the day-to- day supply chain. “The ability to tie tactical and strategic objectives together with multiple scenarios will offer even greater flexibility and better decision making for global operations,” she said. And this, believes Bursa, will help balance the need to improve service levels while creating a more efficient and transparent supply chain.
The impact of mobile
For Phillips, the SCM market will feel the impact of mobile profoundly. “Indeed it may well drive a lot of the methods of mobile adoption in other areas such as manufacturing,” he remarked. “Much of the ‘back end’ work for this has already been done – porting
applications for mobile devices, ensuring the infrastructure is there to enable connections etc. However the real key to unlocking a lot of the productivity boosts that mobile can bring to SCM is based on delivering a consumer grade experience at work. Everyone knows how to use Facebook. Everyone can pick up an iPad or Android phone and figure it out in a few minutes – even seconds. The challenge is to exploit that familiarity and intuitiveness to make it that easy to use the technology in the warehouse or operations planning office. This consumerisation will happen quickly in SCM – in fact it is already underway – and mobile devices will be a natural focus for it.”
Phillips believes there is also some way to go with the exploitation of social media. “It offers an interesting and potentially very effective template for some areas – SCM being a great example,” he said. “For example, instead of following a person on Twitter, you could follow a job order throughout the supply chain and
receive short, quick updates on progress just as you see Tweets from a person. Available via a mobile device, this could provide critical visibility of orders where the manger or director happens to be. We have created a Tweetdeck-like application called Pulse as part of our integration suite that has so far had very positive feedback and bodes well for this area of development.”
Quantifiable metrics
Gaurav considers that over the past two years the movement of more business applications into the Cloud has become more prevalent. This popularity is made clear, he states, when one considers the recent report from ARC Advisory Group, which revealed the SCM market grew 7 per cent over the past five years, while the SaaS market grew at a compound annual growth rate in excess of 20 per cent during those same five years. “I’d expect this trend to continue,” said Gaurav.
www.logisticsit.com
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