As if data quality and stockouts weren’t enough of a day-today worry for CIOs, added pressure to serve demanding online customers and keep up with changing legislation are creating new challenges. With several retail giants lumbering online and the looming introduction of the government’s new carbon tax, CIOs need to be working with procurement, financial and other business leaders to ensure supply-chain systems are up to today’s new challenges.
If supply chain experts can spend so much time and effort improving efficiency and still have more work to do, how are smaller companies meant to get their supply chains right? It’s not as if they have been standing still: CIOs at FMCG organisations and other companies of all sizes have long focused on using high-end supply chain management solutions to trim fat from their company supply chains. Many embarked upon massive enterprise resource planning (ERP) implementations a decade ago as they stared down the end-of-life of existing systems and the spectre of the Y2K bug. Yet while their intentions were good, the same can’t be said for the methods of resolution.
It all started, as these things sometimes do, with a chicken.
How will people work 10 years from now? Gartner thinks it has a pretty good idea, predicting 10 major changes that will occur during the next 10 years.
In late 2008, Monsanto licensed a seed coating that helps corn, soybean and other seeds fight insects and disease during the tricky germination stage. By early 2009, company scientists had finished work on that cocktail of fungicides and insecticides, dubbed Acceleron, and the company wanted to get the coating to market in time for the 2010 planting season. "We were going after that opportunity very aggressively. If we don't hit season, that opportunity is another 12 months away," says CIO Shirley Cunningham.
As a core competency for businesses, "supply chain automation" seems like a management directive from the bygone eras of "knowledge management" and "reengineering." It harkens to the days of sending and receiving handwritten orders via fax, to lacking a thorough understanding of the true identities of the suppliers that exist in companies' downstream chains.
Ego Pharmaceuticals is expecting to increase its production and supply capacity through a new rollout of SAP’s Business All-in-One software.
A famous superhero once noted, with trepidation: "With great power comes great responsibility." Retail juggernaut Wal-Mart, with US$401 billion in worldwide sales, has always wielded the "great power" part with its suppliers.
For any business today, purchasing enterprise software -- ERP, CRM, BI and supply chain -- apps is probably unlike any other corporate activity.
Without question, today's supply chain applications can provide unmatched visibility into a company's supplier base, help spot inefficiencies and allow for better, smarter decision-making on logistics and inventory.
Some economists are recommending that U.S.-based companies that have sent work overseas bring it back to the U.S. They advocate for "on-shoring" or "backshoring" - not as a protectionist trade policy-but as a strategic move designed to conserve a market (namely, U.S. consumers.)
Wal-Mart has demanded that its Chinese suppliers adhere to green, environmentally friendly and product safety standards. But experts say that ensuring compliance in the complicated, vast network of Asian suppliers will be nearly impossible.
Data loads will shape the truck loads of the tomorrow.
The US government warnings about tainted imports from China are ominous and ongoing. In July 2007 poisonous chemicals were found in toothpaste. This was just a month after imports of farm-raised Chinese seafood and lead paint in Thomas the Tank Engine toy trains were detained. And May had seen contaminated pet foods sicken and kill thousand of US cats and dogs. Now its humans, when earlier this month every parents' nightmare became a reality: Melamine contaminated infant formula poisoned more than 50,000 Chinese infants and resulted in at least four deaths.