Winning the game in demand management is a yard-by-yard gain. There may be some super long passes and some genius calls, but by and large, making progress requires granular visibility of the market, and software that can understand the data and, like a great quarterback, call the shots in a timely way.
Time-critical decisions in transportation, risk management, security, disaster response, manufacturing, and other operational domains require continuous real-time situational awareness and intelligence. Most enterprise systems do not provide this today.
Demand management as a pursuit, a skill, a function and a set of technologies has grown considerably in importance due to new ways to reach customers and new ways to analyze data about them. Intense competition for product companies and retailers and the squeeze on margins challenge companies to get a lot better at planning.
Speaking of the cloud, Plex CEO Jason Blessing says, "Enterprise software is going through the most disruptive and innovation phase in decades. Time is compressing, the way we use technology is going through a revolution"¦.Enterprise software is cool again." Quite a statement, since in the last decade the cool factor was clearly with Zuckerberg, Dorsey, and Mason (founders of Facebook, Twitter, and Groupon, respectively).
The major direction of most of the big ERP companies these days is modernizing and upgrading their ERP portfolio. Epicor, Aptean, Infor, QAD, UNIT4, SAP and others all have major platform upgrades to which they are trying to migrate their customers. This presents a huge dilemma for both the customer and the ERP providers.
One well-known and highly respected high-end fashion retailer provides a good example of an end-to-end RFID implementation. They have more than 50 stores across Europe and North America, offering a wide assortment of high-end men's and women's fashion clothing.
Real-time monitoring already happens in intensive care healthcare settings, where patients' vital signs are constantly monitored. Now, use of the technology is being extended to less intensive settings, like remote at-home monitoring of the elderly or patients with chronic conditions.
The way suppliers are typically segmented may work well for prioritizing procurement resources on supplier selection, managing supplier performance, and supporting and developing strategic suppliers. But it doesn't always work well for prioritizing resources on risk management and compliance. Many B and C suppliers may be easily switched, but still represent large material risks to the company (such as litigation or regulatory fines).
Managing the risks imposed by suppliers and third-party service providers has become increasingly difficult and expensive. At the same time, the risks imposed by these relationships keep on getting larger and more costly. Yet procurement and risk personnel are expected to do more with less.
Once we were discussing how supply chains are designed when someone made an insightful comment: "The vast majority of supply chains are not designed. They just happen. Their current form is the cumulative result of hundreds of mostly uncoordinated individual decisions made over many years or decades." The same could be said about enterprise application integration for many companies, in spite of the earnest efforts of enterprise IT planners and architects.
