Analyst Insight: Today's chief supply chain officer (CSCO) is beset by pressures on all fronts, struggling to understand and meet customer demands for cheaper, faster and efficient logistic processes from source to final delivery. Under omnichannel competitive pressures, web and mobile orders tendered by 2 p.m. must be fulfilled and shipped in the same. These growing B2C fulfill-to-deliver flows add shipping and labor costs and, if not optimized, impact margins and profitability. This constitutes a call to action! - Bob Heaney, Research Director and Principal Analyst, Aberdeen Group
Analyst Insight: The connected nature of today's business environment is driving exponential growth in data, which is subsequently driving improvements in advanced analytic capabilities and the opportunity to leverage advanced analytics in manufacturing processes. For industrial manufacturing firms, capturing real-time data relative to asset performance and condition enables predictive maintenance and helps to realize productivity improvements and cost savings by reducing unscheduled downtime and optimizing asset performance. - John Santagate, Research Manager, IDC
Analyst Insight: The state of enterprise software market has changed to the point where organizations may be conflicted as to the type of systems to select. ERP, point solutions, third-party integrations and BPM tools have introduced doubt to organizations trying to match their business requirements to IT strategies. Too much choice may increase the quantity of IT failures due to companies implementing the wrong type of software. - Keean Persaud, Managing Director, Eval-Source
A lot of security processes failed during the breach of Target's systems during last year's holiday season, but one surprising revelation was that the retailer actually did receive security alerts about the malware in its system. Yet because the security team was bombarded with alerts - estimated at hundreds per day - it couldn't adequately prioritize them.
ABI Research forecasts that the M2M analytics industry will grow a robust 53.1% over the next 5 years from $1.9bn in 2013 to $14.3bn in 2018. The forecast includes revenue segmentation for the five components that together enable analytics to be used in M2M services: data integration, data storage, core analytics, data presentation, and associated professional services.
The data explosion: so much to look at, so much to sift through! We are so fascinated with big! Big boats, big cigars and big shoes. But what, really, is big data? What does it mean to your business? And how can you or should you manage it? Although adoption of the buzz word is new, the management of big data is not.
Chainalytics LLC, a provider of supply-chain intelligence, analytics and advisory services, has introduced Integrated Freight Market Intelligence (iFMI).
Analyst Insight: It's been another year of exciting times within supply chain management, especially with regard to S&OP - as we continue to improve upon a 35-year-old process of balancing demand and supply. Approximately 85 percent of supply chain management professionals around the globe say they are exercising the S&OP process (informal polling of approximately1,000 execs over the past year). About 65 percent of those professionals are positioned in Stage I or II of AMR's (now Gartner) S&OP Maturity Model. While this is positive news, it's clear that globalization of our supply chains requires more than just S&OP basics. - Gregory L. Schlegel, adjunct professor, supply chain risk management, Lehigh University Graduate Program
Analyst Insight: As the global economy slowly begins to improve, large-scale manufacturers who ship bulk product by rail are again experiencing the issues of service reliability, asset turnover, capacity constraints, working capital optimization and risk. With that said, after the dismal 2008-2009 economy, we're right back into the bane of a one-hundred-year rail dilemma: enhancing service reliability while improving fleet utilization to sustain a lean rail fleet. Current rail management tools are effective at tracking historical transit times and identifying the position of each car at a certain point in time. However, an important disconnect exists between seeing the future demand for rail shipments and predicting the usage and location of the cars over the entire enterprise planning horizon.
- Alfred Sherk, CEO, SherTrack LLC
