Nextgen requirements from Supply Chain tools
Faster, stronger and higher - these words sound great for a sporting event. Every year records are broken, new ones are set and everytime individuals and corporations alike have broken barriers thought to be unsurmountable. At the same time there have been individuals and corporations that have fallen like pack of cards due to intimidating challenges either of their own making or due to external business conditions. While businesses are constantly reinventing to survive, running faster to stay at the same place, growing stronger to stay afloat among competitors and climbing higher to protect its position in the market, one of the key elements of survival for businesses of today is to keep its supply chain competitive.
In last several supply chain projects, there have been many insighful discussions that indicate how businesses want supply chain tools of today to truly meet their requirements. Some of the key requirements of businesses in supply chain context, that are required from nextgen supply chain tools include:
1. Seamless Planning and Reporting - The users of the supply chain tool want instant capability of reporting on plan performance and those generated. The architecure of supply chain tools would need to conform to this requirement without compromising on other capabilities. Today's tool in general do not offer this capability and businesses instead have to depend on a stand-alone reporting tool to import all data and run queries on them.
2. Realtime Plan adjustment - Supply demand situation keeps changing in transaction system. Business expects realtime plan adjustments happening based on business rules without causing too much of variation in the plans. In today's world, planners have to wait for a weekly/monthly run for looking at how the tool planned for a new supply chain situation. This reduces realtime capability of businesses to respond to changing situations.
3. Navigation and Display performance - Supply chain models of today take into account a huge scope, scale and conditions in the business. In retail and CPG contexts, the sheer size of the model could be mind boggling. While on one hand it could be argued that superior powerful machines could do the trick, on the other there are opportunities in the tool to provide intelligent navigation and display options optimized for "most frequent" accessed data. Today's tool could take forever in terms of displaying data that business wants to glance through.
4. Integration with document, spreadsheet and presentation tools - Most of the business relevant information is sometimes dispersed in documents, spreadsheets and presentation tools. It becomes important for planners to thus work in an interoperable situation where plans from supply chain planning tools are directly available in other formats. In the same vein, information in other business software tools also needs to be available at appropriate places in the planning tool. Today's tool have somewhat rigid architecture and business has to scramble and rummage through various sources.
5. Intra-Organizational collaborative capability - Most of the supply chain planning in today's world is team work. There are entities outside and inside the organization that require to work in close co-ordination to make things happen. Businesses want different entities inside the organization to have a platform inside the tool to collaborate and help make decisions. This is to make sure "left hand of the organization knows what right hand is doing". Today's tools focus on extra-organizational integration and provide platforms for these external entities to collaborate.
Based on roadmaps of some of the supply chain tools and the flexibility that it is expected to offer for some of the implementation partners, businesses can definitely heave a sigh of relief. The key for supply chain tool vendors to survive tomorrow is to constantly adapt to new requirements. Survivial strategies in most environments do not change - be it the nature or the supply chain !
