Greg Brady

Why aren’t more companies demand-driven? I had an eye opening discussion with the SVP of supply chain at a multi-billion dollar company the other day, and together we tallied up the number of systems under his watch. In less than 5 minutes we came up with over 20! I thought it would be an interesting exercise to turn our discussion into a “Coordination Quiz”.

As I discussed in my last post, “From Vertical to Virtual Integration”, over the past 25 years or so, supply chains have become far more complex and dispersed, and technology has struggled to keep up. Lack of upstream and downstream visibility and lack of control are reoccurring complaints that I hear from companies across industries, including Retail, CPG, Automotive, Logistics, Hi-Tech, and the Military.

More and more, people are now beginning to grasp the potential benefits of putting their supply chain in the cloud, and as a result, software vendors of all types are scrambling to label themselves as being "in the cloud".

Think for moment about the amount of technological change we’ve all experienced in the last 25 years. I once listened to music with a clunky eight-track player. Now I have Spotify, which lets me instantly stream nearly any song from the cloud for free. I once booked trips with a travel agent, manually entered business contacts into a Rolodex, and physically carried important documents on a floppy disc.