As mentioned in last Friday's post, we had the privilege of recording three interviews with Jake Barr. In this video, Supply chain transformations: Going after game changing change, Jake says we are on the verge of making a massive step change in supply chain management. The last two decades has been about investing in infrastructure to run the day to day transactions of the business. The step change will be one about improving decision making. And this won't require infrastructure investment – it’s about leveraging existing information, but having a superior way to mine, package and take action on that information. In Part 2: Supply chain transformations: Going after game changing change, Jake Barr explores the following questions:
- Do the advancements in the past few years represent incremental improvements or fundamental shifts in supply chain management strategy?
- What is an example of a company making a fundamental shift in their supply chain strategy?
- How can companies move from functional excellence to end-to-end supply chain process enablement and alignment?
Jake, a 32-year employee of the Procter & Gamble Company, directed the Global Supply Network Design efforts for the Company, in addition to being the discipline Director for Supply Network Operations. So, as a former practitioner, he has a lot of insight to share. ... please check it out!
Notable passage:
"We’re talking about the last two decades having been spent by and large across most of the industry, from a consumer products standpoint, of investing in infrastructure to run the transactional mass of just the day-to-day business. So being able to deal with simply the millions and billions of units that need to be produced and ordered and fabricated and shipped and all of that. But the step change is one around decision-making. The step change is actually being driven by the fact that there are new techniques now available that don't require huge infrastructure projects, that don't require new translations or ripping out of existing processes, that actually can provide an easy way to lift, integrate, and then translate for decision makings. Information that's available and has been available for years, but the ability to mine it and package it and take action on it wasn’t possible. So that is a massive leap that will reconfigure the way most companies in this industry will compete. So over the next three to five years, that will be massive. Part of that is the advent of cloud computing. Part of that is the ability to bring data out of these very different infrastructures and actually merge them, coalesce them, and package them for decision-making. None of that was possible in as little as five to seven years ago. So it's transformational in nature. “Incremental” is playing it down. It’s transformational what’s about to happen."
Happy Friday 21st Century Supply Chain readers! p.s. feel free to check out the past clip...
Part 1: An executive's perspective: The evolution of CPG companies and their supply chains
And stay tuned for...
Part 3: Insights for today’s business leaders
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