Forget about Siri! Talking to your iPhone is certainly cool. But you still have to tell Siri what you want and what Siri has to look for. Wouldn’t it be great, if your phone would anticipate, what you want to ask and give you the answer before you have even asked for? The same probably the case with supply chain managers. It is certainly cool to “talk” to the ERP system and get the system do the planning, the ordering, the invoicing, …. But like with my iPhone – every day I manually have to turn on the silent mode, when I go to bed, or I have to turn on the airplane mode when entering the airplane, or turn on/off Bluetooth for my headset in the office. I want these things to happen automatically, so I don’t have to worry about them anymore. Likewise the supply chain manager: He most likely would also appreciate, if certain actions would happen automatically and he did not have to worry about. So – how to make the supply chain read your mind? My answer to this...
In a world faced with the prospect of tightening supplies, higher energy costs heightened geopolitical risk, and strained transportation networks, advanced supply chain technologies will become mission-critical for many more companies. The supply chain task is not an enterprise problem; it is an end-to-end network problem involving multiple enterprises. Therefore, the solution does not lie in fixing one link in the chain but in devising a community.