Conquering supply chain’s next frontier

This is an excerpt of the original article. It was written for the July-August 2016 edition of Supply Chain Management Review. The full article is available to current subscribers.

July-August 2016

What’s the difference between us and our competitors? Our people!” I can’t think of an organization that doesn’t publicly state that its people are its most important asset. Yet, anyone who has been in the workforce for any length of time knows that when the rubber hits the road—or something else hits the fan—people are usually the first casualty of cost cutting. It’s far easier to free up your talent for “other opportunities” than it is to close a plant or sell a fleet of trucks.

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“Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.” Never has Pablo Picasso’s statement been truer than in today’s era of Big Data and massive computing power. With an abundance of data supplying companies with more and more answers, making great decisions should be easy, right? In fact, this abundance of “answers” may be obscuring the most important component of datadriven decision-making. Are companies asking the right questions?

Recently, a client was experiencing significant cost and service pressures in their inbound supply chain and was looking to infuse analytics into their decision-making process. Under a myriad of pressures from shoppers, suppliers and logistics partners, they immediately prioritized improving their inbound service and reducing logistics spend as their initial business challenge.

They were eager to analyze their data to address these issues. However, before beginning the analytic process, it was important for them to take a step back from the data analysis and ensure that their organization was ready for data driven analytics. Companies that have achieved this next frontier of supply chain productivity anchored their organization around several essential elements for effectively leveraging analytics.

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