9 Expected Supply Chain Innovations.

In Q3 2017, Gartner released its Hype Cycle (bottom of this blog), indicating what it felt would be the main innovations in Supply Chain related Technology by 2022. (You can review those expectations in my last post - "Digital or Dead".) In this post I would like to look in more detail at those more time sensitive top 9.

Descriptive Analytics : This allows companies to understand what is currently happening or has happened across a number of Supply Chain operational factors, typically this will include capabilities like reporting, dashboards, supply chain visibility, data visualisation, and alerts. Whilst this has been around for a number of years and adoption is now in the mainstream, many companies are now looking one step beyond this to Predictive Analytics, which not only support the notion of, yesterday and today, but also tomorrow. Gartner has listed this as the only innovation in its Plateau of Production, meaning within 2 years this will be widely adopted.

Centers of Excellence (COE) : I find this notion long overdue, an environment/group/department/internal or external team, the platform I feel is open to discussion, that is responsible for discovering new innovative ways to manage the supply chain, weather this be through new technology, or new practices. Not every company suffers the same challenges, but for years companies have forced technology or documented best practices around their operations, often poorly fitting and resulting in more issues being created. Finally, companies are coming to the conclusion that there are other options, you just have to try them, but fear of damage has often halted innovations, but with a COE, companies can now be creative in how they manage their SC's. Gartner has suggested this will be widely adopted within 2 years.

Diagnostics Analytics : This is basically the connected step beyond Descriptive and or Predictive Analytics, to understand as to why something happened. Although it is noted that functions such as this will be twinned with developments in areas such as IoT and Real Time technology, or RTVN's (Real Time Value Network's). Estimated time to wide adoption around 2 - 5 years

Targeted SC Segmentation : More around best practice, this is the principle of breaking the Supply Chain down and managing/treating it differently to other segments of the business, that can be inventory, logistics, planning etc... Gartner predicts this will be widely adopted within 5 years, but don't expect ground breaking news in this space, this will likely be overshadowed by other advancements.

SC Management Business-process-as-a-service (BPaaS) : Back to technology, this cloud solution likely delivered through a Network PaaS (Platform as a Service), will offer the opportunity to quickly implement valuable business processes like compliance and reporting, freight forwarding, customs processing, aftermarket management etc, without the need for major department change/creation or new enterprise technology. Likely to be in the mainstream within 5 years

Supply Chain Visibility : Creating a complete view across the entire Supply Chain operation including all trading partners, this is when we finally start to appreciate that a Supply Chain is in fact a Supply Network. This will offer views across the true end-2-end processes, but be warned, twinning execution with this is vital in driving full value of End-2-End Supply Network Management. This, sometimes refereed to Collaborative Control Towers technology will be in the mainstream within 2 - 5 years, although I imagine the healthiest companies will be looking at earlier adoption.

Big Data : This has been around for some time, more so in many companies as a focus point to drive internal and external business process change, Big Data, is critical factor in improving analytics and ultimately real time end-2-end supply network visibility. Gartner again predicts this to be widely adopted within 5 years, but again, I imagine this will be much sooner for many global players.

Social Learning Platforms : For many years now the advancement in Supply Chain Management applications and Social tools have grown and advanced independently of each other. We are now starting to see these two developments come together, as Supply Network (SN) solutions adopt Social features in support of both knowledge improvements and better SN management. A good example of this would be One Network's Social Apps. Gartner's prediction for wide adoption, 2-5 years

Solution-Centric Supply Chains : offer customers a personalised collection of products, data and services from a digitally-enabled ecosystem of partners. It’s an approach seen mainly in high-tech, medical, consumer and industrial sectors at the current time. Gartner predicts this is at least 5 years away for mainstream adoption.

As we see SN's lean heavily towards Digitisation, many more of the Hype Cycle predictions will envelop the road map of many a global business. The next 5 years will very much be a make or break for many companies who find themselves, mid air, having yet to notice they have jumped into the Digital world, prepared or not.

Exciting times.