Page 5 - Supply Chain Magazine

Extended Supply Chain

The New Order: Extended Supply Chain

The entire ecosystem would be treated as part of the supply chain, where suppliers will have
complete visibility into key customer demand and have their response plan ready. This will give

them a clarity on how inventory is working and how scheduling needs to happen on its part. Such

a system can have tremendous business benefits, for e.g., in the case of a transportation agency

that delivers perishable food, a sensor can be installed to submit a report on the food quality to
the monitoring system.

As the opportunities & market size are increasing, the challenge to respond to it is getting

tougher. Few factors are still in its midst of change. Technology delivery models such as cloud
and mobility, new ways of payments such as Apple Pay and Ariba Pay, high end processing

systems such as HANA, Big Data and predictive Analytics; all of these are still evolving and will

make a large impact on businesses in the coming years. The IoT wave will get devices to

communicate with each other and localized cloud computing (Fog ) will reshape the way data is
being created and consumed for localized business purposes.

What this means for most the businesses is –

1. New order will remove complexity that core ERP brings with it.
2. Customers will have best of the breed solution catered towards enhancing productivity of
the specific business process – not necessarily dependent on Core ERP, which may still
be there as a transactional system.