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BUYLINES
Yankee Maps SCM Future
Supply chain researchers at the Yankee Group (www.yankeegroup.com) have issued "The Enterprise 4-Year Supply Chain and IT Roadmap." In the new research paper, and in a related discussion of SCM vendors, Yankee covers a lot of ground, from analyzing the SCM vendor landscape and predicting its future evolution, to laying out factors for enterprises to consider when planning the development of their supply chains.
On the enterprise side, Yankee says that better management of demand and supply is "the best way to improve business performance," and that over the next four years businesses will have to advance from supply chain management to what they call "network supply management" or NSM (oh great: another acronym).
Simply defined, network supply management means the management of data and information flow across the extended network of a company's business partners, including suppliers, logistics providers, banks and customers, among others.
Yankee cautions that the technological complexity involved will make the evolution to NSM a slow and painstaking process, but says that a successful migration will yield benefits in such areas as product design and introduction; sourcing, procurement and materials management; marketing, sales and revenue management; and manufacturing, inventory and fulfilment.
On the vendor side, Yankee predicts that by 2007 a handful of powerful vendors will have the SCM market sewn up. SAP and Oracle are top picks to dominate in the SCM areas covered in Yankee's research.
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