TECHNOLOGYFEATURE
TECHNOLOGY TRENDS AFFECTING SRM
CLOUD It is fundamental to modern
BIG DATA The term applies to a raft of technologies designed to store
COLLABORATION AND SOCIAL MEDIA Businesses think of social media as a consumer trend – a way of sharing life events, trivia and gossip. But the building blocks for social media can be used to share information and ideas between multiple businesses from anywhere in the world, on multiple devices. Either for collaborating on specific projects, sharing useful insight on technical problems, or crowd-sourcing new ideas, social tools can help businesses harness the power of their suppliers. ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE Once the stuff of sci-fi, artificial intelligence means business. Both IBM and Google now offer AI services via the cloud. An army of start-ups are doing the same. Machine learning can quickly draw inferences and connection between data sets that could take years to tease out. Think about supplier financials: which events are indicative of serious trouble and which are just a blip? Combining financial data with return on assets, supplier performance data, and data from the wider world could reveal hidden patterns and ultimately predict opportunities and risks.
computing. The advantage of reaching any computing resource quickly with no capital outlay is phenomenal. Off-the-peg ERP? Yes. Limitless storage? Sure. Social media platform? Certainly. From established business applications to the latest experimental technology, anyone can get it. Today. On a credit card.
and analyse data in greater volume, velocity and variety than possible with conventional techniques. The data is everywhere: smartphone locations, video content, web data, weather data, customer data, machine data. The list goes on and on. In SRM, big data techniques can allow businesses to collate and understand supplier KPIs, which they have always found difficult. These technologies can also be used to predict supplier risk, using internal sources, combined with external feeds from social and conventional media. BLUETOOTH ORWI-FI, AND TRACKED VIA APPLICATIONS Supply chain managers can also monitor temperature, humidity and vibration to assess risk to goods in transit. The concept extends to factories and operations inside suppliers organisations. Connecting to suppliers' in this way can help relationship managers achieve more detailed KPIs in more or less real time. Data can also be stored to help identify ongoing problems and solve them.
DEV-OPS Related to cloud, DevOps is the new model for making software. In the old days, developers created software, then handed it over to operations. There were endless rows and turf wars between the two sides. Development wanted the latest technology; operations wanted stability. With DevOps, that’s gone. DevOps teams build in short sprints and test and deploy to a tightly controlled environment, in the cloud. It transforms speed and agility.
THE INTERNET OF THINGS Putting computers and smart phones online is only half the story. Anything in the supply chain can be connected to the internet, located via RFID.
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