SCM software design principles that never go out of style
CORE PRINCIPLES
Below are links to papers that offer core concepts at the intersection of software and supply chain management
Supply chain management software is in need of an overhaul. The architectural paradigm that has been in place for the past twenty years is limited in its ability to rapidly address the significant and continuous change brought on by increasing customer expectations and new competition. This paper examines the problem and describes ten key elements important for future solutions.
Setting up an omnichannel supply chain requires end-to-end system thinking and leveraging technologies to create multiple virtual supply chains across the physical asset and labor base. This paper defines the omnichannel challenge, discusses the economics behind it and offers ten key steps to consider in setting up an omnichannel strategy that is synchronized to your business goals.
Supply chain segmentation is the process by which companies can create profitable one-to-one relationships between their customers and their supply chain. The goal is to find the best supply chain processes and policies to serve each customer and each product at a given point in time to maximize customer service and company profitability. This paper explains the concepts and reasons for segmentation and discusses tend key areas where policies and technology are important to achieving its goals.
S&OP has evolved from a long-range planning process to a planning process coupled with a sense-and-respond capability designed to steer operations to plan achievement. This paper examines how control engineering concepts can be applied to the traditional S&OP process, turning it into a close loop management process, instead of a traditional open-loop planning process. S&OP has evolved
Microservices are today's flavor of web services. Microservices are self-contained units of software code that have no outside dependencies, except APIs. But the concept of services and APIs have been around a couple of decades now. This paper examines how services can be used to solve supply chain management problems. This approach is important for both legacy and new systems. This is part of a long trend towards unbundling software capabilities into capabilities that can be accessed synchronously and asynchronously through APIs. This unbundling provides much more flexibility in plugging in and out software capabilities.