5 Ways to Tell If Your Supply Chain Is Fully Reinvented for the Transformative Age

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Glenn Steinberg You’ve been hearing about “the supply chain of the future” for years. How it will provide end-to-end visibility. How it will self-manage customer inventories. How it will need only two employees, a man, and a dog: the man to feed the dog; the dog to prevent the man from touching anything. And now, in the Transformative Age, such a state-of-the-future supply chain has become vitally important. Disruptive technologies such as machine learning, the Internet of Things and blockchain are leading to super-fluid markets: fast moving, fast changing and frictionless. To thrive in this environment, companies need supply chains that operate as holistic ecosystems. And you can have that now—we can finally deliver what we’ve been talking about for years. So if you are planning a reinvention of your supply chain, here are five criteria for gauging whether it is (or will be) the future-ready supply chain you need. It’s Agile Agility starts by aligning business strategy and supply chain strategy. The supply chain must be able to support the agility requirements of your business, with adaptation for everything from evolving customer needs to changing constraints on the supply side. It’s all about immediacy, responsiveness and hyper-accurate anticipation. This requires unprecedented levels of change, including: Data analytics-fueled supply chain segmentation based on various customer groups Operating-model change so the organization can fulfill new business models while responding at the speed of changing marketplace conditions A supply chain intelligence layer that guides and enhances the actual performance of the supply chain in real time It’s Cognitive The intelligence layer for supply chains is a mosaic of advanced technologies. But it requires far more than adding machine learning, blockchain or additive manufacturing (3D printing). It’s about orchestrating emerging technologies and members of your ecosystem to move in lockstep. And then […]