The Smart Phone of SCM – no synching sessions required

As one of the ‘go to’ people for supply chain practitioners when it comes to defining supply chain strategy and determining what tools to use to support the strategy, it is important for us to understand and internalize the Gartner perspective. For many years now they have been using the term DDVN. I believe the definition is very close to the Kinaxis Control Tower perspective. Demand-driven value network (DDVN) is a business environment holistically designed to maximize value of and optimize risk across the set of extended supply chain processes and technologies that senses and orchestrates demand based on a near-zero-latency demand signal across multiple networks of corporate stakeholders and trading partners. My suggested edit to this definition is that it should include a supply signal too, not just a demand signal. The supply signal is important for when you need to respond because supply does not match demand, or when supply changes after the initial demand/supply balance. However, the key DDVN message is that an end-to-end process capability is required in order to achieve supply chain transformation. Satisfying individual functional needs – demand planning, supply planning, inventory optimization etc – will not get you there. What companies need is a single end-to-end solution rather than a hodge-podge of functionally-focused applications loosely tied together with SOA technology.

Remember the days when you had a cell phone, a separate calendar device, a paper-based address book, and you could only email from your laptop over dial-up? Remember synching all those devices? Each app had its own device and own UI, and you usually needed multiple synch apps because the synch apps were point-to-point. That is what we have for most SCM solutions today.

I like to think of RapidResponse as the smart phone of SCM, bringing this all together into a single solution with no synching required.

Unfortunately most companies are still approaching SCM technology from a functional selection perspective. And as a vendor, the challenge is to fight for the opportunity to tell the end-to-end story to those that care about the end-to-end story.

Additional Resources

• Inventory optimization frequently asked questions