The Fourth Industrial Revolution: Some Supply Chain Managers Just Don’t Get It
I just read an interesting article, with the above title, in SCMR (Supply Chain Management Review) online. The author talks about all the right stuff - independent processes and data points in the supply chain becoming a series of inter-connected nod es sharing real-time data. The revolution is coming but I think we need to be realistic about when it will arrive. I think it will arrive a widely different times for different firms and their industries. The Fortune 500 or Global 1000 will have a different timeline than the small-to-medium enterprise (SME). I spend a lot of time in the SME market space where I still see a large proportion of companies running major aspects of their business on MS-Excel, non-integrated software, and manual processes. While I believe in the technology and benefits of Supply Chain 4.0 in this article, and many similar ones, the company that is still doing a once-a-month update of inventory into their custom in-house MS-Access application or spreads
