History of the future 

The Sinclair Cambridge, Texas Instruments Scientific c, and HP Business Consultant calculators were new technology around the same time that the supply/value chain emerged 50-odd years ago. High-tech indeed, and costly. It was technology that sped up human ability with a few functions. But calculators are relegated to being one basic but essential function in the background of scientific and business IT. Just a processor in a mass of connected processors driving myriad functions that work together to solve problems we set – and at the speed of light today.

When it comes to the application of IT, just doing, speeding up, or simplifying the answers to problems we set was fine, but is it enough decades later? Of course not.

Engineering technology that assists production, storage management, and transport/distribution has developed into something that was unthinkable 50 years ago. But it happened. And we should know that it’ll continue to become more sophisticated, more useful, and more cost-effective. Warehouses and trucks are no longer at the Model T stage of development.

So, too, when it comes to IT in supply chains, application is no longer a question; it’s fundamental to business existence and competitive position. Application isn’t just the basic financials, a bit of planning, some inventory management, and a touch of procurement – that’s the past. At the bare minimum, we have to get used to the current ‘new’ technology so we move from Henry Ford’s ‘black beauty’ to Ferruccio Lamborghini’s eye-bending electric exotics. Tempus fugit, times they are a-changin’ – whatever… that’s the history. Get ready to apply the future – now.

Current future 

Automation, collaboration and innovation are the right ideas but are becoming passé, almost ordinary, as we apply them to the problems we believe we have. Supply chain (SC) networks are creaking as the inability to change – the arthritis of SC nodes – worsens and continual scaling up for dominance creates dinosaurs. But we didn’t see that coming. We relied on a static past.

New experiential-based learning is required to solve new problems that we may face. Add scenario analysis and planning on top of root cause analysis; we have to become cognitive – thinking laterally, being open-minded, armed with risk and probability, aided by broader experience, and having foresight from real data and events not over-affected by our experience and business prejudices. Gut matters – but whose gut matters too. We need to consider that some problems that need fixing are old, but realise that some are new or we’ll do the same-old and be left behind.

Crystal in the office 

Supply chain IT starts with looking inside our organisations. We have supply chains that ERP like SYSPRO will help when it comes to manufacturing and distribution, enabling us to become effective, competitive and profitable supply chain partners. Then we share plans, making our industry supply chains lower cost and more globally competitive.

But recent disruptions show that we need to see what’s coming, and how we’ll have to adapt and prepare for the likely scenarios to survive in business through disruption we didn’t cause.

ERP, WMS, TMS, collaborative hubs, tracking and all business/SC applications now need user monitoring to ensure transactions are processed in a governed way. This feeds business intelligence/analytics, which must be armed with predictive capabilities – assessing what is likely to happen to supply, demand, delivery and import/export.

To augment your own experience, you must employ a new friend: artificial intelligence – the new guy that learns way faster than all of us as it learns with machine learning from the data we collect, looks for patterns, potential outcomes/events, their probability of happening, the consequential effect and the cost… what a friend it is. Add outside data/indicators using IoT that affect your world and you can predict the future and adapt in time. This is where IT and business are going – smart people thinking machines. •