SupplyChain Magazine February 2018 | Page 61

and get smart about their business . Newman concludes : “ Companies that fail to adopt a smarter IoT by processing data automatically are likely to get swallowed up by the data monster that is surely to come .”

A recent report by Accenture stresses the importance of having the right people involved in supply chain management in your organisation to deliver the data driven decisionmaking Newman describes .

“ Supply chains can essentially jump the digital evolution curve by adopting a networked supply model of operation enabled with advanced analytics instead of following a more conventional progression based on legacy enterprise resource planning and supply chain management systems . As organisations integrate big data analytics strategies into their operations , they will need to update their talent strategy , including upskilling and hiring , or contracting , talent to leverage the power of analytics ,” asserts the report .

Accenture stresses that using analytics to automate more routine supply chain decision-making related tasks will help free up existing resources in house to upskill talent to “ focus on higher value-added business tasks ”. Additionally , automating the ingestion of massive amounts of data from myriad sources across the supply chain will lead to increased operational efficiency .

Extending out from just mining existing data , predictive analytics seeks to extract information from current data sets in order to forecast future probabilities with an acceptable level of reliability , including a few alternative scenarios and risk assessment . “ Being in logistics , it ’ s crucial to help upstream and downstream partners grow ,” maintains Danny Halim , Vice President of Global Wholesale- Distribution and 3PL Industry Strategy at JDA . “ This could be as simple as providing consumer sentiment , down to the assortment insights in the case of the retail industry , as well as seasonality patterns and consumption forecasts ,” he adds .

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