Innovation Cycle In Supply Chain

We have entered into a time of discontinuous disruption that is being driven by innovation demands in the supply chain. This disruption is spawned by recent innovations driving new demands that are in turn driven in large part by the technology improvements and capabilities. These demands have create an innovation cycle in the supply chain that has produced amazing results and produced a framework through data analytics and artificial intelligence to support the discontinuous disruption cycles through the innovation cycle responses resulting from the analytics and artificial intelligence innovations. In the future this will become the expected norm in the supply chain and will require increasing innovation in analytics and artificial technology delivered through a highly collaborative extended supply chain network to meet the disruption.




The question comes now of how to continue to meet the innovation demands in the supply chain in order to react and meet the disruption that is driven clearly by technology and customer demands. I am referring in this case to customer / partner demands in the extended supply chain, in other words, everyone in the supply chain is feeling the pressure from demands of their customer / partners and every partners is demanding innovation to meet the disruption in their process and procedures from these demands. In the extended supply chain demands and disruption can only be met with collaboration and innovation. The extended supply chain has been building the network and the collaborative partnerships especially over the recent years to give them the foundational tools in collaboration to meet the disruption in an efficient and robust manner.




This is now where all the efforts to build a robust collaborative network to provide the framework and foundation for partner integration comes into play to provide the basis to support the types of innovation required to support the demands. This network provides the ability for partners across the supply chain to plug in to provide goods and services to support the innovation demands. This is really where the value comes from the collaborative network. Innovation cannot be delivered in this environment without a robust collaborative network that can adjust and support the demands. As an example, the collaborative network provides the framework for pop-up point solution providers to jump in to quickly and efficiently support changing demands thereby eliminating the requirement for the service to be developed internally by a partner. This method of collaborative delivery is much more efficient than any previous model for supporting changing demands and discontinuous disruption.




The final piece of the puzzle necessary to support the innovation cycle in the supply chain is the control tower framework that supports efficient integration and collection of data that is necessary to support the data analytics and the artificial intelligence demands that are driving the successful response to the supply chain demands. Everything runs on data today and without a robust control tower framework to manage the efficient collection and integration of data the supply chain would quickly be overwhelmed with the changing demands. The control tower provides the means for the analysis and reaction to changes in the most efficient manner.