Guest Column – Ehsan Ehsani from Supplychainer.com
February 20, 2006 by 3plwire
Filed under Guest Columns
Are Supply Chain IT systems so costly to run and maintain?
Ehsan Ehsani – supplychainer.com
Miya Knights from Computing has written an article recently, regarding the results of a survey between 400 European and American companies. In the survey 26 percent of the companies said that SCM solutions are so costly and if they invest large amounts of money on these solutions, they won’t have enough money to spend on the business itself.
Actually a critical question arises here: Should the managers invest in buying these solutions or not? I myself think, the answer depends on the size of the company and also a concept which I call SCM Readiness.
Let’s start with the Readiness. I think that achieving a level of maturity in implementing and using IT systems is a predecessor for buying a SCM solution. Otherwise, it may lead to more frustration and high costs. I will come back to this idea of maturity later in the next articles.
And about the size, yes, maybe it’s to costly for small businesses to run such solutions and they’d better use some simple soft wares instead.
So, it’s better to look at these issues too before buying these expensive complex packages. Maybe a proper PPT (People, Process & Technology) analysis will lead to better results. It seems that many companies just get into the hype of the SCM solutions with too narrow focus in mind. Instead, a proper Global Optimization Consideration (Effect across the supply chain) will help these companies in making a proper choice of the SCM solutions.
Ehsan Ehsani is the author of SupplyChainer.com . As a technology author and SCM expert, he has consulted and worked with various companies in operations side of the business.
He is also a regular contributor to Supply Chain Management Forum and Production & Operations Monthly(POM). Ehsan lives in Gothenburg, Sweden and can be reached through ehsan@creative-weblogging.com
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