The future of Supply Networks

In the future, effective Supply Chain Management (SCM) would be a key differentiator for companies working on a competitive market was the message that emerged from the Operations Continuum, an event hosted by the Shailesh J Mehta School of Management, IIT Bombay on September 25th and attended by students from various B-schools. The event was a part of the yearly Continuum series, a forum for B-school students to get an insight from the knowledge and the experience of people from the industry. The current Continuum was based on the theme of ‘Future Supply Networks’ and ‘The Role of RFID in Supply Chain‘.

Inaugurating the event, the Head of the Department Prof. Mangesh G. Korgaonkar stressed on the global and profound impact of technological innovation in the area of SCM and also spoke about the need to develop financial parameters to link financial performance to investments made for SCM. “ Supply Chains are moving away from being rigid and modularized and are becoming more flexible. In this context, we need to see how best we can leverage technology”, he remarked.

The role of Adaptive Manufacturing in ensuring a Demand Driven Supply Chain (DDSL) was the theme of the talk by Ravi Mandayam, Development Manager, SAP. Explaining the need for DDSL, he also stressed that Adaptive Manufacturing, which involved the ability of the plant to profitably replenish the Supply Chain while dynamically responding to unpredictable change was imperative if companies needed to run at the ‘speed of business’. “To be able to have a demand driven supply chain, there is a need for manufacturing excellence”, he remarked. Mr. Narayan Rajagopalachari, Vice-President for Global Consulting Services of i2 Technologies spoke about the need for enterprises to be agile and enumerated the Best practices in Supply Chain Management, which included, intimate customer and supply knowledge. He remarked that that the mantra today was optimization and synchronization of supply chains and for that the demand, supply and the product processes needs to be fine-tuned.

The differences between traditional supply networks and the Demand driven supply networks and the need to shift from the former to the latter was the theme of the talk by Adnan Ahmad, Director for Supply Chain at Castrol India Ltd. He elaborated on what aspects change needs to be made and the critical success factors for this purpose. “India is on the verge of a tremendous revolution in Supply Chain innovations”, he added. According to Ashok Pai, Director for Supply chain Solutions at Bristlecone Ltd., “ Both process re-engineering and use of IT is required for boosting supply chain efficiency.” “Supply chain processes needs to be looked at first before embarking on information technology initiatives”, he added.

Various speakers discussed the technology behind RFID and its applications in Supply chains. Sandhya Sule of Patni Computers discussed the technical details of RFID and the associated standards commonly referred to as EPC (Electronic Product Code) standards. She emphasized that the adoption of RFID in India was mostly compliance driven and not because of cost reduction. She enumerated some of the deployment of RFID solutions in India but warned that use of such technology should be only if there is a sound business case and after a successful pilot project. Rajiv of MAQ Software, a US based firm specializing in RFID and smart card applications gave an insight on some of the RFID applications which MAQ was currently working on, which included a pilot project for the Rajasthan State Transport for real-time tracking of their buses along the National Highways. The approach towards the use of RFID in manufacturing and the practical issues involved in its implementation was discussed by Rajat Modi, Consultant for Technology Advisory services at PwC by taking the example of an ongoing pilot implementation of RFID for a power major in India. According to Rajat, “The endeavor to use RFID in manufacturing is in removing all non-value adding activities”. The underlying theme across the event and the talks was that Supply Chain Management is here to stay and that it is going to witness lots of technological innovations like RFID in future.