IBM Smarter Planet: Supply Chain Management

http://www.ibm.com/services/us/gbs/bus/html/bcs_supplychainprocurement.html?c... IBM's supply chain study sheds light on new capabilities and approaches for operating a sucessful supply chain in the current economic climate.
NARRATOR: Looking to become a smarter supply chain executive? Meet Sanjeev Nagrath. He runs the global supply chain management practice from IBM Global Business Services.
MR. SANJEEV NAGRATH: In today's interconnected world, supply chains have become truly global, requiring new capabilities and approaches to address challenges in this environment. To better understand this environment, we interviewed a diverse group of senior supply chain executives to delve deeper into what challenges they were facing.
NARRATOR: We interviewed 400 senior supply chain executives in 25 countries over 29 industries. The study uncovered key challenges that face supply chain executives and some surprises. Karen Butner with the IBM Institute for Business Value found that one of the biggest surprises for her was that risk management was high on the list of concerns.
MS. KAREN BUTNER: We're all accustomed to supply chainers thinking about cost containment; thinking about how to best move their products and services across the world to their various customers. But, to find out that it was really risk management and that the disruptions and those types of things are really top of mind.
NARRATOR: The supply chain executive of the future will have myriad challenges.
MS. BUTNER: Oh, I think that, in general, the supply chain needs to be much smarter. And, the supply chain officer and executive of the future needs to help to transform current supply chain activities to be much smarter. The supply chain really needs to be more interconnected. We need to really collaborate more closely, obviously, with our customers, but also with suppliers, logistics providers and the other constituents in the supply chain. And, more importantly, automate the supply chain so that inventories are monitoring themselves. And, people are more involved with the exception management and the executive decision making, the strategies and less involved in the day-to-day tactics. Another area is being more intelligent as we entitled our report, The Smarter Supply Chain of the Future. Being more intelligent in everything we do; using models and simulation; using advanced algorithms.
NARRATOR: The study sheds some light on what the future holds for supply chain executives.
MS. BUTNER: It will need to be a role that's like a master orchestrator, almost like literally, as the name orchestrator implies, they're pulling together all of the resources, all of the assets, all of the talent, all of the resources within the supply chain around the world. I think supply chains will absolutely become smarter. I think they will become smarter for a lot of reasons. One is because they can. Today, a lot of this capability exists. There'll be some new things that don't even exist that'll be invented to make them smarter; new instrumentations and such. But, I think they'll also become smarter because they must.
NARRATOR: To learn more about the smarter supply chain of the future, visit our website to obtain the full results of our survey.

Category:

People & Blogs

Tags:

• data analysis
• data management
• information management
• business analytics
• supply chain management
• financial management
• organizational change
• application management
• strategy consulting
• operations strategy
• human capital management
• business risk management
• supply chain optimization
• economic environment
• business insights
• supply chain study