The following Supply Chain Matters blog is part of our ongoing series of deep dives into each of our previously unveiled ten 2017 Predictions for Industry and Global Supply Chains.
At the start of the New Year, our parent, the Ferrari Consulting and Research Group along with our Supply Chain Matters blog as a broadcast medium, provide a series of predictions for the coming year. These predictions are shared in the spirit of assisting industry specific and global supply chain cross-functional teams in helping to set management objectives for the year ahead. Our further goal is helping our readers and clients to prepare supply chain management and line-of-business teams in establishing impactful programs, initiatives, and educational agendas. 
The context for these predictions includes a broad cross-functional umbrella of supply chain strategy, planning, execution, product lifecycle management, procurement, manufacturing, transportation, logistics and customer service management.
In an earlier Supply Chain Matters blog postings, we provided deep dives related to:
Prediction Two- A Challenging Year in Procurement
Prediction Three- A Supply Chain Talent Perfect Storm
Prediction Four- Increased Anti-Trade Geo-Political Forces Provide Added Global Sourcing Challenges
Prediction Five- Continued Global Transportation Industry-wide Turbulence
Prediction Six- A Renaissance in Supply Chain Focused Business Services and Technology Investments
In this deep-dive series posting, we drill down on our next prediction.
2017 Prediction Seven- Enhanced Supply Chain Intelligence Capabilities Among B2B Network Platform and Managed Services Providers Will Pay Dividends for Customers
In 2017 and beyond, there will exist increased industry specific needs for deeper and wider levels of customer, product, physical object and supply network focused information visibility, capture and analysis.  This need is coupled to building multi-industry supply chain requirements for more predictive, analytics data-driven decision making competencies that involve outside-in insights. The objective is a literal 360-degree view of supply chain wide data and information, horizontally spanning the end-to-end supply and vertically coupling high level enterprise to shop-floor decision-support needs. Enhanced business intelligence and overall process improvements further enhances the ability of industry supply chains to support new, more innovative business models that can leverage digital technologies in areas of product or customer related services.
A means to achieve such capabilities are analytics and business intelligence engines that are now being embedded across supply chain focused B2B network platforms, edge systems and production shop floor transactional and information transfer flows. B2B business networks and edge platforms are today the prime opportunity for digitizing the horizontal and vertical flow of information and analytics across end-to-end supply chains. Whereas predominantly EDI messaging platforms were viewed as required external messaging utilities to transfer and receive transaction and electronic messaging information across disparate systems, there is now collective movement by network providers to transform these platforms to business intelligence and analytics based information repositories available to support broader supply chain and product focused decision support needs. As noted in Prediction Six, this an area where blockchain technology can have a profound long-term impact, but beyond that, many existing B2B technology platform vendors such as Ariba, an SAP Company, E2Open, GT Nexus, IBM, OpenText are already moving in the direction of blending supply chain wide planning and execution related transactional data with analytics, cognitive and business intelligence capture. Such analytics and trending information can then be moved to and from various existing business application systems related to planning and customer fulfillment.
Similarly, the vertical notions of what is being often described as either Industrial Networks, Industrial Internet and edge systems, are various physical devices communicating via IoT enabled technology, within their respective operational and performance status data streams. Here again, emerging IoT network technology providers are similarly incorporating cognitive and analytics based capabilities to synthesize the streaming levels of data being captured into information and required decision-making alerts.
An Evolving New Challenge
The evolving new challenge for industry supply chains will be the ability to exchange information and insights among various existing Cloud-based B2B networks and resident business software applications focused on either customer, product, supply, production, service or fulfillment process needs. This is a challenge that must be addressed in order to gain the full benefits of the Cloud. Ideally, supply chain teams will seek the ability to have a virtual information utility or data lake, but that could be expensive and many industry supply chain teams are not necessarily ready to manage such capabilities at this point. Today, such challenges fuel an evolving need for managed services providers or systems integrators to tie-together such structured and unstructured information and analytics in virtual streaming information and analytics data pools or zones available to all enterprise and supply chain business applications and systems.
Technology vendors now recognize this problem. For instance, Oracle recently released a Hybrid and Multi-Cloud Services utility as part of its Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) Cloud infrastructure services. Oracle’s intent with this service is to support the needs of data movement, data transformation, data quality and applications integration among multiple Cloud platforms and applications.
Focus on a Networked Cloud Strategy
All the above stated, industry supply chain and line-of-business teams should strive to prioritize and scope certain business process decision need areas, for example customer fulfillment and logistics, or an initial supply chain control tower capability, and work with an individual platform vendor or focused systems integrator to start the journey towards streaming analytics and insights from external Cloud-based platforms. We view this as a prime process and business support opportunity for supply chain teams in 2017.
B2B or B2B-to-B2C business network platforms related to process needs in areas such as procurement, product management, planning, logistics or customer fulfillment should no longer be viewed as solely messaging or transactional platforms. Over time, they will serve as sources of analytics, insights and alerts related to process, suppliers, and customers. Business, functional and sales and operations planning teams can gain more real-time insights by broadening their perspectives beyond messaging to messaging and trending.
This concludes our Prediction Seven drill-down. In our next posting of this series, we will explore Prediction Eight reflecting on how Alibaba and Amazon will continue to battle for global online platform dominance.
Stay tuned.
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