Next week, this author will be featured in the webcast, The Supply Chain Control Tower, Moving Beyond Just Visibility, which is being jointly sponsored by a newest sponsor, Progress Software, and Supply Chain Management Review. In this webcast, I will speak to the prescribed capabilities of supply chain control towers that can supply-chain wide enhance decision-making, as well as how companies need to properly prepare for their roadmaps and deployments. Thus far, over 300 have registered to hear about this timely topic. The webcast occurs on May 10 at 2pm eastern time, and we welcome all of our readers to register for this complimentary webcast at the following web link.  Supply chin teams who are in the process of either evaluating or deploying supply chain control tower initiatives are welcomed to provide us your direct feedback.

On May 8 and 9, Supply Chain Matters will be attending the MIT Leaders for Global Operations hosted conference, The Future of U.S. Manufacturing in the U.S., being held on the campus of MIT. A number of panel discussions and speakers will address the topics of innovation in manufacturing, workforce needs, and barriers to success in manufacturing. U.S. Secretary of Commerce John Bryson is expected to speak along with Bob King, President, United Auto Workers. Other speakers include senior executives representing Amgen, Boeing, Caterpillar, General Electric, General Motors, Johnson and Johnson, Spirit Aero Systems, among others. Registration is currently closed. We will provide highlights of this important and timely conference later in the week., so stay connected.

Bob Ferrari

We apologize to our readers if you have been experiencing problems accessing both the Supply Chain Matters blog and our Ferrari Consulting and Research Group web sites today.

Our ISP host provider, Network Solutions has been experiencing domain access outages which has caused our site to incur three separate temporary outages in the past few days.

Rest assured we are working to resolve this problem with our ISP provider and apologize for inconvenience in accessing our site.

This is a quick reminder for our Supply Chain Matters readers.  About a week ago, we featured a commentary concerning the need for increased analytical skills among supply chain management and planning teams.

Related to that posting was an invitation to participate in our current interactive poll which asks:  Do you believe that there is a growing need for supply chain management professionals to improve their analytical literacy and skills?

We would certainly appreciate your input.  The poll is located on our right-hand panel and no registration is required to participate.

Thanks.

By now, our readers have been catching-up on our global supply chain look back of predictions and events that occurred in 2011, as well as our corresponding Predictions for Global Supply Chains in 2012.  The year 2011 has proven to be a rather challenging one for supply chain teams from many perspectives, and 2012 looks to be just as challenging.  Many have risen to the challenges and some have succumbed.

As we approach the celebration for the calendar 2012 New Year, we should all take pause and reflect on the blessings of family, friends and professional career.  Much has been accomplished and we often do not take the time to celebrate.

We extend to all our Supply Chain Matters readers our best wishes for a prosperous, healthy, productive and beneficial New Year.

Bob Ferrari, Founder and Executive Editor

The Christmas holiday is fast approaching and we extend to all of the readers of Supply Chain Matters warm wishes for the holiday season, with thoughts of peace and joy for the coming New Year.

In the coming week we will have a limited publishing schedule as we enjoy some down time with family and friends.  We will however pulish some commentary, especially for major supply chain related news.

The holidays provide a great time to pause and reflect on both the current and coming year.  Do take the time to scan Supply Chain Matters for major developments that occurred this year, and our supply chain predictions for 2012 and beyond.

Thank you so much for your loyal readership and continued interest.

Happy Holidays…Feliz Navidad….Buon Natale…Joyeuses Fetes…Frohe Weihnachten…

Bob Ferrari, Founder and Executive Editor

This continues our series of commentaries outlining our 2012 Predictions for Global Supply Chains. These predictions are provided in the spirit of advising supply chain organizations in setting management agenda for the year ahead, and in helping our readers and clients to prepare their supply chain management teams in establishing programs, initiatives and educational agendas for the New Year.

Readers are welcomed to review our previous series of postings.  These include:

 The full listing of 2012 predictions

Predictions One and Two.

Prediction Three

Prediction Four

Predictions Five and Six

Prediction Nine: Wider scale leveraging and adoption of in-memory computing technologies among enterprise and specialty supply chain vendors, coupled with broader leveraging of data mining, have the potential to be game changing influences on supply chain wide business planning and response management.

This is essentially a repeat of our 2011 prediction, which did not come to full fruition.  We, however, remain firm in the belief that breakthroughs in larger-scale in-memory computing will pave the way for adding much more responsiveness to supply chain operations, planning and business intelligence processes. This is also an area where the challenges for managing and mining large data volume and the fusing of the physical and digital aspects of supply chain can be brought together.  The question is timing and demonstration, and readers should note that we have not affixed a firm 2012 timing for this prediction.

The converging forces of a more rapid clock speed of business change, along with senior management imperatives for quicker, more timely and responsive decision-making in response to events, continue to motivate supply chain management teams to shed sequential supply chain planning and execution processes in favor of a combined response management process that is built upon more rapid planning and predictive analytics that anticipate various scenario responses to an unplanned event. Today’s cadence and process-sequential S&OP processes are having some difficulty with keeping up with the current clock speeds of business change. The goal now equates to delivering the most timely knowledge and insights to the point or process of need.

Vendors such as Agistix, JDA Software and Kinaxis (one of other Supply Chain Matters named sponsors) have already demonstrated this capability.

The biggest player with the highest game-changing impact is SAP and its HANA development efforts.  Unfortunately, the latest indicators coming out of the SAP Influencers Summit in mid-December indicate that SAP wants to not only leverage HANA technology for leveraging more in-memory insights, but also leverage the technology to eventually make SAP one of the top three players in database deployment.  Supply Chain Matters feels that this added burden will only delay the real impact of HANA in the advanced analytics area, and that will be disappointing for many SAP customers.

Oracle has also been developing interesting applications in this area, and recently acquired information discovery vendor Endeca. IBM has also assembled all of the supply chain technology components for in-memory advanced analytics and has the potential to deliver some breakthrough.

This concludes Part Seven of our Supply Chain Matters 2012 Predictions.  In Part Eight, we will conclude this series with our tenth and final prediction, the increased adoption of systems of engagement in 2012.

Our complete research report which outlines all ten predictions in a single document is now available for no obligation free download in our Research Center.  (Listed as We only request that you provide some basic registration data including name, email, role and phone contact.  All information remains confidential and no salesperson will call. We also do not sell our registration lists to any third parties.

In the meantime, readers are encouraged to share observations and added predictions from your industry and functional lenses.

Bob Ferrari

© 2011 The Ferrari Consulting and Research Group LLC and the Supply Chain Matters, All rights reserved.