Reimagine supply chains at Gartner’s Supply Chain Executive Conference 2013

Changing market conditions are driving companies to reimagine their supply chain and push the boundaries of conventional thinking. Gartner’s upcoming Supply Chain Executive Conference will delve into key tactics, tools and strategies supply chain leaders can employ to foster growth and efficiency amid rising competition and economic change.

It’s a theme typical to Gartner and their conferences: very strongly focused on global trends, combined with a top-down view on supply chain concepts, approaches, methods, and maturity levels. With 750 analysts worldwide, they are capable of putting structure into almost any aspect of supply chain development. But let’s face it, this wealth of information can also be difficult to process: which insights are applicable to your company, how can you apply them to your own supply chain, and what should you prioritize? Obviously, you can’t keep up with all their combined output, but they can help you with that as well…

Putting a bit of teasing aside, I admit that if you’re looking for specific approaches to drive supply chain improvement, Gartner’s conference will undoubtedly provide you with some valuable insights and approaches, conveniently grouped into themes. Three of these themes stand out for me personally, and I am looking forward to learning more about them at the conference:

1. Demand Driven Value Networks or demand-driven supply chains. We’ve reached the end of the capabilities that forecasting may bring, so we should look into making our entire supply network more agile and responsive to variations. Variations may occur in demand, but also in our own capabilities to produce (maintenance, disruptions, scrap, etc), or our suppliers’ ability to deliver.

2. Supply Chain Centers of Excellence (or SC CoE): a means to drive continuous optimization. This concept addresses the key challenge of leveraging the full potential of your company’s brilliant supply chain staff. A SC CoE should give meaningful goals to a concentration of expertise and resources. In so doing, it creates a powerful platform to achieve orchestration across the supply chain, foster innovation, and create opportunities for SC talent. It allows you to explore powerful new tools and innovations, which your entire organization can benefit from.

3. Supply Chain Segmentation: the balancing act of designing and managing multiple supply chains focusing on different segments of clients, markets or product life cycle stages. This approach is about finding the optimal balance between service differentiation and advantages of scale. It helps you identify a solution to maximize the use of your assets over the combined set of supply network configurations.

These themes are key to stay ahead of your competition. Ignoring these areas will likely turn your life as a SC Executive into an uphill battle. Without them, you will find that you can’t match the speed and service level of your competitors or meet your needs to supply chain improvement. Luckily, flexible and highly advanced optimization platforms like AIMMS can help you achieve your supply chain goals with minimal hurdles.

Join me at Gartner’s Supply Chain Executive Conference, taking place in London from the 23rd to the 24th of September, to learn about the latest developments in supply chain optimization. The AIMMS team will have a booth there, and I’d love to meet you and exchange experiences and insights.

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