As bob ferrari mentioned, listening to the cast of speakers yesterday was like drinking from a firehose.
We got to hear from leading practitioners, the experts from MIT and Gartner on the future of supply chain, and the various disruptive solutions that can be gamechanger or killers depending on whether you adopt or reject them. You heard from Irfan and Naresh abioutg the Anti-Fragility index that can be the compass in your journey.
Having been in the SC space for about decades we have been in the trenches with our customers doing the transformations or reacting to many of these disruptions. 2 years ago we launched Bristlecone LABS with a mission incubate many of these solutions that twill be required by the SC of the future. This is a research center that provides the ideal environment for customers to co-inovate or conduct research in leading-edge technologies that could impact the Supply Chain. Today I’ll take you through some of these use cases.
Many of you are already aware of what keeps SC leaders and CxO awake at night. The top six are represented here:
In the age of “instant gratification” and “diminished brand loyalty”, it is becoming even more important to be able to predict a customer’s latent demand and the demand moment.
As Dr Leo Bonanni highlighted yesterday, given the highly networked nature of our Supply Chain, there is a need capabilities that provide greater and almost instant visibility and predictability across their supply chains to better understand risks
With concepts like “Same day delivery” becoming the norm especially in CPG, there is an imperative to improve Agility within all the connected supply chain
In today’s highly competitive global economy Cost efficiency, cost reduction, and spend analytics will continue as top business priorities in supply chain management.
While the concept of continuous improvements have been there for decades, leading companies are deploying capabilities to predict process failures before they happen.
The same business imperatives of risk, agility, quality, provenance, etc are making traceability a key desired capabilities
The key underlying theme behind these capabilities are that they represent an “Outside in” view and many of them can be synthesized into a single business metric , e.g. risk index like what Dr Bonini talked about or an even more unified index like A-Index that Naresh talked about.
The question is how to improve these KPIs
Many companies, especially those at Stage 1, Stage 2 level in the SC maturity level, believe that DSC is the solution and that DSC can be achieved by deploying IoT, Blockchain, ML, etc. DSC is not about just blindly deploying various technology but rather identifying the key actionable capability that needs to be developed to impact the “outside in” business metric(s). This is an illustration of how some of the strategic business metrics can be broken down into actionable tactics.
This is where the disruptive technologies and models come in.
The future of DSC has three main attributes.
There will be acceptance realization that it is not a chain but instead it is a network
It will be Antifragile – where when it is subjected to shocks, it will learn from it and become stronger. In other words, the right corrective action would ahev already been executed as a part of a playbook in anticipation of an impending flood.
It will be autonomous or self aware
To give you an idea, here’s a solution
Provide temperature and humidity monitoring with real time tracking
Violation alerts with a live visualization of the Blockchain back-end, transaction by transaction
Harness internet chatter to obtain real time market intelligence and send proactive near real-time alerts to buyers
Makes your supply chain truly nimble, equipped with competing alternatives to tackle huge global variations in supply and demand
Dr. Sanchez talked about the bank with army of C programmers and how that model is being disrupted in areas like data science where companies are using networks like GiTHib to leverage the work that came before and thus speed us their own capability buuilidng
We went through the same learning. No instead of developing these one off solutions and sometimes developing soltions from scratch, we developed a platform called NEO that helps us modularize and pavkage many of these disruptive solutions.
Here’s a much more shameless plug for Bristlecone. The buildout of the platform has also helped our clients to consume these capabilities through various engagement models
Co-Innovation
Disparate Technology SMEs
Business process experts
Platform & Partner Ecosystem
Rapid Protiotyping
Design Thinking Workshops
Prototyping
Wireframing
Point Solutions
Known pain areas
Proven solutions & best of breed technologies
Staff augmentation
CoEs
Identified Use Case roadmap
Core team
Economies of scale
Agility
Dr Sanchez also talked about “industry being built on code reuse” and “teachers becoming curators of academic content”. That is where we are going: the Uberization of Supply Chain.
[Vendor] solutions curated based on industry, application, business problem, etc.
Amazon/App store rating for solution providers enabling greater trust, quality, agility, efficiency
Market Place Driven Pricing