Supply Chain Investments in Tech

Where Are Retail Supply Chain Investments Heading?  

16 EXPERT COMMENTSGARTNER OPTIMIZE PIONEER SCALE Simon Jacbson Supply Chain 

May 16, 2023, by Tom Ryan  in Retalwire

A Gartner global survey of 499 supply chain leaders taken late last year finds 65 percent anticipate it will be easier to fund new technology investments, with 73 percent of supply chain IT budgets this year to be allocated to growth and performance enhancements, on average.

“The last three years of uncertainty have blurred the line between business and technology strategies to the point that they must be considered together,” said Simon Jacobson, VP analyst in Gartner’s supply chain practice.

Gartner’s analysts came up with eight supply technology trends driven by three motivations: to pioneer new forms of engagement, optimize for resilience and scale performance that enables technology to be delivered “any place and any time.” Those trends are:

Pioneer Scale Optimize Wheel

Actionable AI, which delivers better data-driven decisions by mimicking human problem-solving and keeping humans in the loop for validation.

Mobile asset optimization, which maximizes an enterprise’s mobile assets by combining business process software, sensory technologies and operational research techniques for optimization and business intelligence.

Smart operations, which extend the concept of smart manufacturing to encompass all core operational capabilities, including manufacturing, service and logistics spanning warehousing, transportation and global trade;

Industry cloud platforms, which combine software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) with specific functionality for vertical industry use cases.

Employee engagement, which is a set of tools and applications to help companies improve frontline worker performance, satisfaction and retention.

Composable business applications, which are designed to follow the core design principles of modularity, autonomy, orchestration and discovery with a specific business use case.

Cyber resilient supply chains, which add additional supply chain partners, vendors and service providers to their “digital” supply chain.

Supply chain integration services, which encompass technology platforms, integration teams, strategic decision-making on which applications to connect (different integration strategies) and cloud services to manage these integrations.   ... '