Top 12 IT trends for SCM
Oleg Bokachov 25.08.2019

PROBLEMS ADDRESSED

The current trends to enhance the integration of informational, financial and product flows throughout the whole SCM chain — from suppliers of raw materials and components to final consumers of finished products — promise great opportunities for optimizing processes and resources, but also impose increasingly stringent standards on the maturity of participating companies and their commitment to introduce new information technologies.

So how, among the constantly updating sets of technological solutions, does one choose those which are the highest priority, promising and relevant to the needs of the company? When looking for an answer to this question, decision-makers in the field of SCM encounter the following problems:

  1. There is no confidence in the integrity, completeness and reliability of information about new trends and technologies.
  2. There are no clear criteria for selecting the necessary technologies for the company and eliminating unnecessary criteria and those imposed  by the market.
  3. There are neither clear criteria for assessing the company's commitment to introducing one technology or another, nor understanding of the sequence of their implementation.

APPROACH

When it is unknown what system is to be used to measure the question of interest, it may be recommended that the natural system of measures be used, the one which Nature itself manifest. The LiveDevice approach considers the human body as a natural sequence of functions that can be used to evaluate everything that is produced by any individual or society in all spheres of life. Everything invented by a human only repeats the already existing natural functional levels of life.

SOLUTION

# FUNCTION FUNCTION DESCRIPTION TECHNOLOGY
1. Mindset Distinguishing, comparing with a measure — a standard, ability to learn and change behavioral patterns, choose from existing ones or develop a new best solution based on systematic knowledge Artificial intelligence
2. Senses Detection of external influences of the subtle and gross planes, anticipation or prediction of changes based on memory, finding solutions based on a direct perception experience Advanced analytics
3. Expression Meaning encoding with forms of expression and decoding expression forms for exchanging information with the external environment and describing the internal states Internet of things
4. Relationship Natural interaction with other individuals through self-identification and identifying other individuals Autonomous things
5. Management Goal setting, desire, inspiration and willpower effort at self-realisation HUMAN
6. Administration Task organising, development of relevant skills for task management and solving emerging issues Robotic process automation
7. Provision Developing a lifestyle and harmonious behavior that bring happiness; immersion in coarse and subtle physical phenomena Immersive experience
8. Production Production of everything essential for survival; distribution, reproduction and excretion (elimination) of waste products Empowered edge
9. Marketing Creating a manifested form of the product and its promotion through social structures for the purpose of distribution Digital supply chain twins
10. PR Presentation and popularisation of the product with the public through the image created by the flow of events and actions in the environment Event stream processing
11. Distribution Creating and maintaining partnership relations, building a network of product distribution 5G networks
12. Sales Processes of interaction and exchange of values ​​with the environment, preservation of activity trails in the external environment and the subject detection by the traces left behind Blockchain

Applying the LiveDevice approach to the described issues, it was found that all the existing leading IT trends as well as the emerging technologies were clearly distributed within the functional levels of the human body by their functions of the performed tasks. This allows using this approach to solve a number of practical issues of the company.

This solution gives the opportunity to navigated better in the constant flow of information about new technologies, quickly determining the function each of them performs and their difference from the existing technological solutions in this particular function.

The given approach also solves the problem of possible unreliability or non-transparency of information: if we know the principle of operation of the previous technologies and their functional level in the universal system, the newly coined names will not be misleading.

The LiveDevice approach can also be applied to a company-consumer of IT technologies to diagnose its basic functions - its availability or condition, which allows assessing the compliance of trends with the company's needs, the importance and timeliness of the trends, and the expected payback for their implementation.

Image by Pexels from Pixabay.com

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