SCM2

This is a first posting on our new blog on Supply Chain Management 2. I thought it would be a good idea to first set the premise, so everyone can put the discussions on where we are heading into a shared perspective of where we are now. I think this may become a multiple posting topic, since there is just so much to say. This topic also does run the risk of running amok with acronyms and buzzwords. Given that the industry is riddled with them, there is no easy way to avoid that when describing the status quo.

I can imagine that all the acronyms that are going around in the enterprise software space are confusing to many people. It gets confusing to me sometimes, and I am deeply immersed and have been for well over a decade. What is SCM? How does it relate to ERP, CRM, SRM, EPM, EAM, BI, SaaS, cloud computing, Web 2.0, sustainability? How about Value Chain Management or demand-driven supply chain? How are these different from SCM? These are just a few of the buzzwords going around. It is impossible to give a straight answer that will make everything perfectly clear, once and for all. If it were, someone would already have done it. Worse, I believe that at least a few of the buzzwords were introduced with the specific purpose to confuse matters; some of the more powerful vendors out there have in the past introduced terms for the simple purpose of hiding the fact that they lacked functionality and making the market believe that they had more, rather than less. Some of them stuck, and are here to stay to confuse an already confusing jumble of terms. In this article I will try to clarify as much as possible.

I’ll take a 2-step approach. First,I’ll introduce an overly simplified approach with which you may determine for yourself where SCM fits in your systems landscape, if at all. Then I will provide more generalized background and definitions. I find that it helps to take a step backward to more general concepts that apply to any process that we want to do well, and continuously improve upon. You may already be familiar with the schematic on the left-hand side of figure 1 below:

Figure 1: Concepts landscape versus an example of a systems landscape

To achieve continuous improvement of a process you need to plan it, execute the plan, measure the effects, analyze the measurements, and use the outcome of the analysis to plan better next time around. → → → Continued Here!