Analyst Insight: Food and beverage manufacturers have the distinct advantage (or detriment, depending on how you view it) of often having direct access to the customer. In today's more open, collaborative, social world this can reap major benefits of understanding one's customer base and responding to its needs. On the flip side, food and beverage manufacturers are susceptible to a major downfall simply from minor issues across its supply chain. Open or not, it's the new reality. - Simon Ellis, practice director, Supply Chain Strategies, IDC Manufacturing Insights
Analyst Insight: While 95 percent of consumer products companies talk about building the end-to-end supply chain extending from the customer's customer to the supplier's supplier, most of it today is only lip service. Why? The processes that made the CP company strong are the very same processes that need to change to drive growth, improve supply chain resiliency and power market share. - Lora Cecere, partner, Altimeter Group
Analyst Insight: In recent years, an increasing number of organizations have sought to make their supply chains more environmentally friendly. According to APQC's Open Standards Benchmarking in procurement, 48 percent of organizations initiated "green" procurement policies as of fall 2011. As organizations feel more pressure to monitor their environmental impact, they must consider the potential effect of enacting green procurement policies on their bottom line. - Becky Partida, knowledge specialist, APQC
Analyst Insight: The rapidly changing business environment has caused software evaluation to evolve, and organizations that do not realize those shifts will be left with inadequate solutions and an increased chance of IT failure. These new trends have complicated an already difficult software evaluation process due to cloud, SaaS, IaaS, PaaS, SOA and Web 2.0 technologies. - Keean Persaud, managing director, Eval-Source
Analyst Insight: Though there is no question that modern business process management (BPM) applications have the potential to solve many technical aspects of business processes challenges, the productive consolidation and integration of this evolution into the corporate culture requires that the management of business processes shift toward an approach that is data-driven, widely supported, and better communicated at the organizational level. - Jorge GarcÃÂa, research analyst, Technology Evaluation Centers
Analyst Insight: In the past, collaboration technology has been a separate software segment encompassing web conferencing and document sharing. But technology providers are now blending these solutions with business applications such as logistics, forecasting and product design, creating a more natural user experience. After all, collaboration is about the business and the people.
Collaboration is also a catalyst for other technology sectors such as cloud, mobile and network infrastructure. - Ann Grackin, CEO, ChainLink Research
Analyst Insight: Consumer packaged goods manufacturers are being squeezed by trends in customer purchasing and technology, coupled with pricing pressures, higher input costs, and fluctuating commodity prices. In today's market, CPG companies have to integrate and collaborate with trading partners and better manage retail shelf space. Growing recognition that failure to innovate will result in poor performance, acquisition, or worse, is driving leading CPG companies to transform their operating models. - Ben Pivar, vice president, Supply Chain Technologies Practice, Capgemini North America Applications Services
ImpactFactor recently completed a study on supply-chain risk, surveying managers of more than 100 companies. The results were not encouraging. According to managing director Bill McBeath, many companies don't consider proactive risk-management to be a strategic tool. He was "shocked" at how level their level of investment in that area was, with half reporting expenditures of $50,000 or less to audit and assess suppliers. "Not a single one spent more than $3m," he says. "Given the huge potential impact [of risk] on their shares, we believe companies are seriously under-investing."
Analyst Insight: Shippers have made great advances in transportation management in the last decade by centralizing procurement and transportation planning organizations, as well as investing in TMS. The question now is: What's the next big thing? As the use of supply chain technology and information sharing grows, there is an increase in the meaningful use of information and integrating transportation with other functions. These areas have already demonstrated significant benefits for pioneering shippers and are clearly breakthroughs in transportation management. - Bill Loftis, principal, Tompkins International
Analyst Insight: Most supply chain management organizations struggle with functional and application silos that make orchestrating and synchronizing business processes across their organization near impossible. Supply chain execution convergence is an emerging Gartner concept where SCE functional silos are broken down and business processes span, optimize and synchronize across traditional functional domains. - Dwight Klappich, vice president, Gartner Inc.
