As Bob and I point out in our joint series on Supply Chain Matters on why legacy sourcing and (supply chain) planning solutions can’t handle today’s supply chain challenges (and why direct sourcing needs to be supply chain aware), moving forward is not an easy task and consists of three main parts:

• persuasion
• platform
• process

and each of these parts presents its own set of unique challenges.

The Persuasion

The technical challenges that will need to be solved will be difficult, but likely won’t be anything that talented engineers can’t solve if they put their minds to it (and avoid the distraction of shiny new technology and the buzzword filled marketing that surrounds it).

But, as we keep saying, it can never be “technology” first.

Moreover, the people challenge — convincing the source-to-supply-to-service professionals, stakeholders, and sponsors to buy in is the harder challenge. Moreover, unless you succeed in this challenge, you won’t make any progress at all.

There’s quite a few reasons for this, as well as requirements for success, and we strongly recommend you dive deep into Part 6 of our series for a discussion.

The Platform

There are a number of considerations with regards to getting the “platform” right, and great engineers will be able to do it, if they realize all that they need to do.

Let’s give them a few tips by starting at the foundations.

They will need to address, and resolve, the:

• data fabric
• federation
• integration
• orchestration
• alignment
• the multi-platform metaprise requirements
• purpose

There’s a lot to unpack here. For a start, we strongly recommend you dive deep into Part 6 of our series for a discussion.

The Process

The process needs to be much more involved than traditional software / SaaS / app selection. It is not just sending out an RFP to a vendor, evaluating the responses, picking one, and then having them and/or your favourite implementation partner implement it.

That’s because you need to do proper Design Engineering and define an ecosystem solution that fits your end-to-end processes, which not only differs between manufacturing and distribution centric organizations, but also across industries (which are subject to different regulatory constraints and operate differently) and even geographies (for enterprises that are regional vs. global).

We offer a few more tidbits on this requirement in Part 6 of our series, but this may just be the process of a future series as we have written multiple series on the past on enterprise technology selection alone, and this goes beyond that as you can’t assume all the vendors did appropriate Design Engineering that considered anything beyond the platform they were selling, if they even considered Design Engineering when they designed their platform.

The short story here is that moving forward is more than just a decision to “make it so”, but a complex endeavour that will take time, money, and top talent. But it is necessary to survive the future of anti-globalization when supply chains are fundamentally global and insanely complex to the point where they cannot be unravelled in some industries in anything short of a decade!