BrainBlog for UCBOS by Jason Bloomberg
Bottlenecks at international ports. Shipping containers piling up. Empty store shelves. Price spikes for consumer goods. These woes have thrust the supply chain into the global consciousness.
Regardless of the complexity of any particular supply chain, the buck stops at the customer touchpoint – and retail owns that touchpoint.
Retail may be the part of the supply chain that faces the customer, but customer delight depends upon the entire chain working properly. Retailers must achieve ever-higher levels of customer intimacy, building immersive retail experiences across the buyer journey.
Omnichannel experiences that support end-to-end customer journeys have now become the norm in an increasingly Amazoned retail landscape. The bar for omnichannel, however, is set quite high.
Every component of the customer experience must be working properly to achieve such customer delight. One hiccup and the entire thing can fail – hence the importance of process transformation driving innovation in the supply chain.
Technology is the Problem
Modern retail depends upon digital technologies to be sure – but older, legacy technologies get in the way.
The vendors of yesterday’s supply chain execution systems created those behemoths to gain efficiencies for standardized processes with predictable outcomes.
Over time, supply chain participants ended up with slow, bloated systems and processes. Integrating systems to achieve any kind of end-to-end process capability was a nightmare, leading to the loss of business context from one application to another.
This house of cards prevented companies from accessing the data they required to run their businesses and compete in a changing competitive landscape.
Legacy technologies essentially jailed their business data in siloed systems that at best can only interact through limited API interactions that did little to preserve the business context essential to implement the process transformation necessary to support the modern buyer journey.
Read the entire BrainBlog here.
