Supply Chain Synchronization

McKinsey’s third annual survey on information technology strategy and spending

I've just finished reviewing McKinsey’s third annual survey on information technology strategy and spending. According to McKinsey, the survey "affirms the continuing importance of IT for strategic success."

In this survey, McKinsey "asked chief information officers (CIOs), chief technology officers (CTOs), and other C-level executives to think broadly about the impact of information and technology on their business: how IT can serve as a tool to help build competitive advantage, what risks arise as competitors use disruptive technology, how companies develop their IT strategies, and what challenges they face in implementing those strategies." The survey reached respondents in October, so their responses include their calculations of how the acredit crisis and deteriorating economic environment would impact their business.

Four items caught my attention:

1) While businesses are making cuts to spending, they are maintaining high-priority new investments such as supply chain management that support broader business goals.

2) Expectations for ease-of-use and availability of information from enterprise application have become much higher due to the proliferation of web applications and personal devices like the iPhone that pervade everyday life. Enterprise application companies with decades of legacy code will continue to struggle to meet these user expectations.

3) The individuals most intimately familiar with the capabilities of their companies IT capabilities -- notably CIOs -- recognize that they are much less prepared to respond to risks than non-IT executives who don't deeply understand the huge technology shift that is occuring.

4) The two biggest gaps between current IT priorites and ideal IT priorities are in the areas of reducing IT costs and creating new products or services. In the case of reducting IT costs, this is a much higher current priority than the respondants believed to be ideal. Contrarywise, the effort to create new products or services is a much smaller priority than the respondants believe is ideal. This indicates that rather than putting focus on growing value to the organization through new IT-enabled products and services, companies typically gravitate towards IT cost reduction which is easier to measure and seen as a less risky proposition. Although history shows that it is the new products and services that ultimately leads to transformational value creation. Here is McKinsey's chart:

Evavi End-User Innovations

Personalization
Every end-user can personalize their workspace to meet their distinct work habits without requiring additional software.

Exception and Alert Management
Every user has the ability to publish, subscribe, and manage exceptions and alerts as an integrated capability of their personalized workspace.

Performance Measurement
Every user is presented with actionable information and meaningful reports in their personalized workspace without requiring bolt-on business intelligence software.

Role-based Workflows
Every user has workflows that are designed for their specific role rather than one-size-fits-all workflows.

Usability
All users, not just those with deep experience operating back office applications, can readily leverage the system.

Evavi Innovation

Overview
We set out with an audacious vision – to reinvent enterprise supply chain management. We have built from scratch a synchronized enterprise supply chain suite that uses only the best internet-native technologies and leverages the knowledge gained from the evolution of supply chain management since the late ‘80s.

The solutions we are delivering are based on more than six years of development by some of the most creative minds in the supply chain business. Members of this team helped define the supply chain software industry in the late ‘80s and early ’90s with their pioneering work in the areas of in-memory optimization and planning. The supply chain software they architected during that time generated over $800 million in sales, generated billions in supply chain value, and launched the industry.

Supply Chain Software Reinvented
Evavi’s Supply Chain Synchronization solutions are the first to be entirely developed and delivered with Internet-native technologies. Built into the entire solution suite from the core are a planning and execution platform, flexible models, rapid extensibility, open integration, performance measurement, exception and alert management, role-based workflows, and consumer-Web usability with personalization at the fingertips of each end-user.