We want to again alert our readers that The Supply Chain Council (SCC) will be hosting its annual Executive Summit on October 13-15 in Houston.

The event offers senior supply chain executives a well recognized forum for discussing key emerging challenges in business and supply chain strategy.  It also offers an opportunity for executives to network with other industry peers through panel discussions, roundtables and other networking events. The theme of this upcoming summit is “Boom & Bust: The New Realities for Supply Chain Excellence”.  Summit attendance will be limited to 100 executives.

You can view further information and registration details at the SCC Executive Summit web site.

It is also my pleasure to announce that I will be in attendance during the summit and Supply Chain Matters will be providing live blog and social media updates during the three days of meetings.

Bob Ferrari

Disclosure: Bob Ferrari is an elected member of the North America Leadership Team (NALT) of the Supply Chain Council, but has no monetary interests in regards to promoting this upcoming conference.

I had the opportunity to provide a July guest commentary on the Infosys Supply Chain Management blog.  In my commentary, Should Firms be Focused on IT or Business Process Portfolio, or Both?, I share the observation that current Gartner and blogosphere commentary focused on a rethinking of a firm’s enterprise applications strategy can be misguided.  My argument is that the end goal should always be the business process architecture.  In the case of today’s more externally focused supply chain fulfillment processes, firms will quickly determine that business processes designed with a prior internal focus and expectation of business process metrics will have different context and supporting enterprise applications requirements when this externally focused reality is incorporated.  There are many companies that have achieved supply chain process integration and have done so because they elevated business process above organizational or systems needs.

Firms should be articulating supply chain process requirements first in business architecture context, followed by supporting enterprise architecture, and not the other way around. This approach, I might add, has many organizational implications. I suspect that this will spur a different context of commentary.

Bob Ferrari

Disclosure: Infosys is one of other featured sponsors to the Supply Chain Matters blog.