While attending the Oracle Modern Supply Chain Experience conference a few weeks ago, this Editor had the opportunity to once again catch-up with Rich Sherman, a long friend. Rich has been a guest contributor of thought leadership content on Supply Chain Matters and is author of the book: Supply Chain Transformation- Practical Roadmap to Best Practice Results. Rich now serves as a Senior Fellow, Global Supply Chain Practice & Centre of Excellence (GSCP&CoE) at Tata Consultancy Services (TCS).

Some of our readers may be familiar with TCS’s efforts in supply chain management. Practice areas include:

  • Supply chain strategy including strategic assessments (data driven for both maturity and digital), and supply chain segmentation strategy support.
  • Planning as-a-Service including Integrated Business Planning strategy and technology deployment.
  • Source to Pay and Logistics and Fulfillment business process support.
  • Digital Supply Chain and Factory of the Future process support.
  • Service Management operational support.
  • Supply Chain Applications – of course, at OMSCE TCS touted its platinum partnership with Oracle for cloud and supply chain applications. However, TSC has partnerships for implementation and support for all of the major supply chain application vendors.

 

I was surprised to learn that the TCS GSCP&CoE now includes over 350 supply chain management domain experts supported by upwards of 3000 IT strategy, applications, and solutions implementation staff resources. Rich informed me that the TCS GSCP&CoE has been engaged in over 150 consulting engagements over the past two years, and further has become a generator of supply chain thought leadership for clients.

In our conversation, Rich and I touched upon a few of the current burning topics and current initiatives that are common across various industry supply chains. They include:

  • Omnichannel Fulfilment and end to end Supply Chain Control Towers
  • Integrated Business Planning beyond traditional S&OP with integration into execution
  • The Digital Supply Network and advanced manufacturing methodologies such as additive manufacturing (3D Printing assessments) for the Factory of the Future
  • “as a service” and cloud based operations
  • Advanced Analytics including assessments, Artificial Intelligence, and Cognitive Analytics for analytics maturity lifecycle management

While the GSCP&CoE focuses on supply chain management consulting, they also tap into other business units for even deeper specialization. As an example, each of TCS’ industry business units have industry supply chain domain experts. TCS’ Analytics & Insights unit has more than 5000 data scientists (including Ph.D’s and even M.D.’s) using all of the available business intelligence tools to provide clients with highly advanced analytics including predictive and prescriptive analytics and insights. TCS’ Engineering and Industrial Services supports customized engineering services such as 3D printing assessments, design, and implementation as well as robotics and advanced manufacturing and material handling systems. Business Process Services provides outsourced operations across the enterprise and supply chain.

As always, it was intriguing to speak with Rich on the transformation of the supply chain into the “connected commerce” age and the maturing of digital technologies. It was also interesting to hear about the TCS that I didn’t know about and hope that now you also know.

Bob Ferrari

© Copyright 2017. The Ferrari Consulting and Research Group and the Supply Chain Matters® blog. All rights reserved.