Supply Chain Management: Supply Chain Predictions for 2010 - how far are we from our end-state vision?

Last month, Infosys got a call from Supply Chain Digest magazine, courtesy the editor-in-chief Dan Gilmore to air our views on the key trends for Supply Chain Management in 2010. Supply Chain Guru Predictions for 2010 published earlier this month covered a set of 5 other eminent folks from MIT, Gartner, Descartes and so on, so I was happy for the opportunity to be featured amongst these industry thought leaders.

As primarily a package supply chain enabler, I stuck to my knitting and covered my theme along two lines (a) Improving efficiencies in the back-end supply chain to reduce costs and (b) Enhancing end-customer experience by augmenting the front-end supply chain. People ask me where the relentless pressure to slay every efficiency killer would end up. What next after Multi-channel commerce, end2end procurement, green asset management... whither goes SCM end-state?

In response, I can only say that we have barely scratched the surface on all these counts and more. Every customer I talk to has light years to traverse on each of these functional domains.

Take the procurement example: There is no client of ours who has even 50% of all spend under management - as in one single system (and thus the wide process variation and the resultant maverick spend). Big-ticket items like marketing, printing or legal all land up directly in the financial system and hardly goes thru a procurement application. Most Global2K customers have 20+ applications doing indirect procurement, sometimes more than 50. Even if this vast application landscape is tamed, contracts remain mostly in bound box files and not in any specific system and RFP processes are standalone or disconnected. Spend Analytics systems typically capture 5-20% of data sources and that takes us to the MDM challenge since we have rampant supplier/item duplication.

In short, each of these are functions I touched upon are holy grails by themselves and many organizations are somewhere in the middle of a really long path towards the end-state that was envisioned as step-1.