With Supply Management - Technology Rules...

Says Patricia E. Moody in the May 1, 2006 edition of Supply Chain Management Review (...)

Technology may not necessarily be the be-all and end-all. But in the supply management space, it's certainly the quickest and most direct route to cutting costs and improving profitability. The companies profiled here show how - with the right people and processes in place, technology can deliver stunning performance results.Technology may not necessarily be the be-all and end-all. But in the supply management space, its certainly the quickest and most direct route to cutting costs and improving profitability. The companies profiled here show howwith the right people and processes in place, technology can deliver stunning performance results.

Reading on in the article, she outlines the following in three companies
1. Hewlett-Packard
E-sourcing - A new buzzword for what was always the aim of upstream (or downstream if you were a supplier) supply chain collaboration with a bit of bidding/auctions thrown in. But think about this for a minute, what might the unintended consequence of this mode of supplier collaboration be? As users of this mode of procurement adopt this technology, all that it involves is poring over competitive bids of the "widget" being delivered - wouldn't a computer be able to do this as well, faster and more efficiently if there are a number of competing "widget" characteristics. A supplier relationship might be transformed from a people based process to a people-computer process.
Procurement risk management - This is one of the innovations (incidentally, also won an award ) that makes working in supply chain management exciting. As the article elaborates:

The software helps HP tackle uncertainty in demand, supply, price, and material costs. It quantifies the risk and the likelihood of certain changes and allows the company to manage risk over a longer time horizon.

This innovation incorporates the "real" problem of managing in the world - dealing with uncertainty, through a risk management approach. The next step - modeling the supply chain using control theory and modeling uncertainty through a disturbance function and seeing the behavior of the supply chain. Ofcourse, I'm dreaming.

2. Caterpillar
Predictive buying initiative - black box stuff also known as forecasting. Which parameter do you wanna change next?

3. Datacraft Solutions
Electronic kanbans - I'm hooked already. Is this going to be a fad or something about to scale across many manufacturing organizations. I've been sold on the TPS and all principles lean, wherever they can be applied and here is an innovation that does away with the kanban cards, where do I sign up. Here's what Datacraft's view is:

posted by AJ @ 4:21 PM