What’s Your Mobility Index?

This is an excerpt of the original article. It was written for the September-October 2011 edition of Supply Chain Management Review. The full article is available to current subscribers.

September-October 2011

Volatility has always been a factor in supply chain management. It just seems that the level of volatility we’ve been experiencing recently has been higher—and certainly a lot more persistent—than anything we’ve experienced in quite a while. Those boring good old days of relative stability have been supplanted by economic turmoil and wild stock market swings; by monumental natural disasters like earthquakes, hurricanes, and tornados; by political upheavals around the globe; and by suppliers cutting way back on capacity or in some cases simply going out of business. These are among the major contributors to that sense of volatility that seems…

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Recently, I was sitting in the audience listening to the CEO of a leading business intelligence platform provider deliver the keynote speech at his company’s annual user conference. CEOs typically use the user conference as a vehicle for announcing a major launch—and this time was no different. This particular launch involved the deployment of reports and order management capabilities on the iPad. It all looked really cool and there was the obligatory audience applause.

Yet as I read the material provided, it became less and less clear how the deployment would drive business value in the core or extended supply chain for users. Was the benefit derived from receiving the information on a device that you could carry at all times? Or was the value in being able to understand the information as you made another mad dash to the next customer? Maybe it was the ability to change your business processes in the supply chain to enable better execution? Or was this just an IT-driven exercise that would involve millions of dollars spent in delivering static old information on the go?

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