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Will Your Team’s Skills be Ready for Supply Chain Planning in 2025?

By Jeff Bodenstab26 May 2015

What will supply chain planning look like 10 years from now? It’s a tough question, but Gartner analysts Tom Enright and Matthew Spooner took on the challenge in their presentation Supply Chain Planning 2025 at the recent Gartner Supply Chain Executive Conference in Phoenix, AZ.

In case you are thinking it might not change much, recall mobile phones from ten years ago (flip phones with voice and rudimentary texting), marketing before social media and marketing automation systems took off, or television before you could watch it on-demand, time-shift or view it on your computer or mobile device.  All the changes have become common only in the past ten years.

With similar rapid pace of change in computing and networking technology, analytics, and now the most disruptive force of all – huge volumes of newly available big data – it’s hard to imagine that supply chain planning won’t evolve significantly in the next ten years. Is your team’s skill set ready for it?

“Ten years might seem like a long way away,” Spooner says. “But developing this type of talent over 10 years… I think you might find is a relatively short period of time.”

We believe planning systems will evolve to accommodate and leverage modern analytics and volumes of data, moving from manually tuning statistical models and reconciling forecasts to focusing on strategic activities such as planning promotions and new product launches. We see a more automated planning process with planners focused on forecast value added.

The Gartner analysts see equities trading as an analogy to how supply chain planning will evolve. “In its fundamentals, equities trading is very similar to the way supply chains work,” says Spooner. “When you think about it, you’re looking for a buyer, you’re looking for a seller; you’re trying to negotiate a price, you’re trying to negotiate a volume; it’s actually a balancing issue.”

Equities trading has changed beyond recognition. First, electronic trading brought data visibility and global trading platforms. Traders no longer yelled and gesticulated wildly on the floor, but the people who had stood on the exchange floors still ran the systems. “They were the people making the decisions, based on their experience and insights,” says Spooner.  Then firms used data and to create sophisticated computer models that automatically drove real-time transactions.

The analysts say that this process of increasing speed and reducing latency are also differentiators in supply chain. Spooner says that planning must be automated; customer-focused supply chains can’t be managed otherwise. “… long chains, where people are making decisions, and then handing that off to the next person in the chain to make a decision… will become a significant competitive disadvantage.”

The end game is a low or even no-touch supply chain—transactions executed electronically, products picked, sorted, moved automatically, with more collaboration with vendors and competitors.

Suggests Spooner, “Transaction planners will become exception planners.” With transactions automated, the key will be identifying exceptions, and taking action to manage them.  “Planning analysts will become Internet of Things analysts,” Enright adds.

Enright and Spooner suggest that demand planners will become profit planners, and social media coordinators—identifying “sentiments,” and what’s happening, via social media, and then getting the right stuff to the right place to capitalize on it.

Supply chain planning will become a science, creating and integrating models with customers and suppliers; evaluating inputs, optimizing outputs, and managing trade-offs; and managing exceptions. The goal is better decision making through supply chain analytics.

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