In preparation for the Supply Chain Insights Global Summit, Lora Cecere spoke with Sujit Singh, Chief Operating Officer of Arkieva, in an episode of Straight Talk with Supply Chain Insights.
With two to three podcast a week, Straight Talk is designed to benefit the supply chain leader that is on the go and wants to be in the know. This specific podcast in part of a larger series leading up to the Global Summit and discusses the future of supply chain, particularly as it relates to S&OP and their global impact. Below is a brief excerpt of their discussion.
Lora Cecere: As you look at the supply chain of the future what do you think it looks like in 2020 and 2025? Can you give us your view?
Sujit Singh: Well certainly I can try. When you say supply chain of the future I am glad you include 2025 because 2020 is not that far anymore.
The way I see the market place evolving is that the pressures we see today will continue to get more intense. They will increase in complexity. It is obvious that there will be an increase in risk in the supply chains of the world. There will be an increase in volatility. I think that we are going to be looking at, we already seeing this, the emergence of global markets and we will continue to see more. The whole information of evolution we have been through will continue to bring pressure on this. As we see the emergence of these global markets the unique local characteristics will become more and more prominent. Just to give an example, we might see that while the demand is just as robust in all kinds of places the supporting infrastructure to get the product there might not be there. The business practices might simply not be as evolved the ones in the western world. So this pressure, I believe, will continue to be there and I think will bring a downward pressure on the market place towards better and better and better supply chain execution which obviously will create its own complexities, competitions, and its own risk. I, for one, believe that the long tail dynamics of the market will play very strongly and what we will see is as the pressure comes to bear the marketplace will evolve into more niche markets, more localized markets where companies will come up with strategies to deal with local complexities, the local volatilities separately. I certainly see just like in the IT space where we went from mainframes to personal computers to now back to a mainframe like cloud computing mindset certainly there is an evolution going on. I do believe that the supply chain of the future will have that mindset where today if we see China as the manufacturing hub of the world I think overtime because of pressure from the customer we will see pressure from the customer we will see a push to get the product manufacturer closer to the customer. Simply because the customer will not be willing to live with longer lead times. They will be very demanding.
So this is a change that I anticipate and the other thought that I have is that companies who will survive this, of course it is difficult to say what exactly will happen, but my feeling is that the companies who survive this will be the ones who have differentiated supply chain strategy by market, by product segment and so we will see an evolution of companies who operate under a conglomeration style where a lot of the work is done locally while still maintaining the global corporate infrastructure.
To listen to the full podcast please click here. Sujit Singh will also be joining the Supply Chain Insights Global Summit as a blogger. Be sure to be follow Arkieva on Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin to read his post during the conference on September 9th – 10th, 2015.
