The importance of supply chain management has been brought into stark relief this year by tsunamis, earthquakes and other natural disasters. While effective SCM seems increasingly vital in the global economy, the field generally relies on old technology and business models, writes Josh Greenbaum, principal of Enterprise Applications Consulting. 

At a recent Kinaxis user conference, Greenbaum heard a common refrain among users, he writes in a post at InformationWeek. Companies said they used an enterprise supply chain management software package from a major vendor, but they chose Kinaxis for one particular core function, such as sales and operations planning or advanced supply chain analytics. Even though the main software remained in place as the system of record, it did not have all the capabilities needed and the user didn't have time for the vendor to add them in or make them user-friendly or affordable.

"Part of the problem is clearly the rapidity with which business models are changing. And the breadth of what constitutes SCM keeps shifting as more stakeholders become involved and more data becomes available to do more complex analysis and build more comprehensive supply chain plans," Greenbaum writes, adding that another problem is that "really transformative SCM is as much a business-process journey as it is a software journey."

Good enough seems to be a long-time characteristic of SCM, but that status can create a challenge for the major enterprise vendors. "Becoming an entrenched interest at a customer site often leads to--or is a leading indicator of--a good-enough mentality that helps maintain incumbency at the cost of innovation. This makes it hard for the SAPs and Oracles of the world to be identified as the innovators among their core, entrenched user communities," he writes.

For more:
- see Josh Greenbaum's post at InformationWeek

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