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  5. Supply Chain In The Cloud: Enabled Just In Time: Page 2 of 2
Cloud Infrastructure

Supply Chain In The Cloud: Enabled Just In Time: Page 2 of 2

Although research firm IDC estimated that $7.7 billion will be spent worldwide on cloud services, most of it will go to enterprise requirements planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM) and cloud services providers, and supply chain management will lag behind. However, now there are signs that these predictions are changing. Much of the credit can go to the recent recession, when many companies outsourced manufacturing, scaled down inventories, and avoided major product commitments
July 13, 2010

"The reality is that organizations are often better served by data intermediaries who aggregate and value add to the data that passes through the supply chain. Most often this data is made anonymous or heavily obscured to ensure privacy and integrity, while giving organizations greater insight and intelligence into data which can be reasonably shared between parties, with the right security policies and protocols in place. These data hubs can provide very rich services beyond simple data aggregation, reporting and analytics," Brand said.

Many companies adopt the Web portal approach to a cloud-based supply chain and achieve fast results, getting their entire supplier bases online in a matter of several weeks. Other companies, mostly large enterprises with robust supply chain integration requirements, require considerable B2B integration with suppliers and with cloud-based supply chain solutions, just as they would with an internal supply chain system. In these cases, integration can be tricky, and is a project that gets into months rather than weeks.

"The biggest obstacles are usually inflated expectations for business users, obstructionary IT departments, and poor alignment in IT infrastructure," said Brand. "Getting the balance right between the level of investment required to move into cloud-based services and the execution of a migration and management plan is still a significant challenge."

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