Businesses today has started to worry on the supply chain modernization. Supply chain, traditionally, is linear, which is strategized to design, plan, source, make and deliver. Many manufacturing industries are trying to automate the production process with intelligent software, that increases the production. But these developments can affect the changes in Logistics and Distribution.

Supply chain has changed a lot in the past three decades. It is required that a responsive supply chain modernization can be created so as to ensure the product gets to the customer at the right time. And for this again, it requires sophisticated planning and modern tools that can help the business to meet the client requirement.

As the automated production starts increasing the quantity of the production, the manufacturer has to ensure the J-I-T inventory requirement changes to meet the production deadline. These manufacturers need to have flexible logistics network to support the channels effectively. JIT (Just in Time) strategy is employed to increase the efficiency and reduce the wastage by receiving the inventory as required in the production process. This strategy requires that the manufacturers forecast the requirement of inventory accurately.

There are many innovations and benefits that can be achieved through IoT, cloud, and digital transformation. The customer is the center of supply chain and manufacturers should look into the trends that can drive customers to buy in the digital world. Technologies with Augmented Reality, Artificial Intelligence, and Virtual Reality can enable the modernization of supply chain and can become a competitive edge against its competition. With IoT, AI and sensors connected, the data collected can improve Product development, and the entire supply chain and logistics management.

As per the report of IDC, in the manufacturing supply chain industry, investment in supply chain technology will modernize the existing systems. And the report projects that the Supply chains will be on the top of the list of leading revenues. Also, supply chain modernization of the existing systems at a lower cost, that can help improve great capabilities.

Companies are looking into seeing how the strategy serves the supply chain and the supply chain partners. The current technology is facing several burdens of increasing costs, for maintaining e-com standards, Inconsistent data interchange translations that results in partner and customer dissatisfaction, inefficient partner onboard, and the inability to streamline supply chain.

Implication for Technology:

IDC manufacturing report insights have given the following list for the modernization of supply chain technology.

1. Faster and Integrated planning in terms of linking to demand signals and scenario planning
2. Adoption of cloud-based technology for the applications
3. Risk and Resilience investments of Supply chain
4. Data management organization and IT
5. Integrated supply chain Execution

With the above implications it can be seen that IT sector is about to face new demands on Supply chain modernization.

For companies who want to modernize their supply chain network components, following are the points that are very important to be considered and requires from Supply chain. While 80% of responses show that digital manufacturing is a competitive edge.

1. Improve return on Innovation spending. It is important the visibility of the process be improved. Product and data be collected and evaluated, the process accelerated, and then the portfolio is balanced.
2. Maintain a flexible approach to logistics and distribution. The new opportunities require manufacturers to search for new channels, to support the supply chain network and integrate and leverage acquisitions the systems that assists new business models.
3. Attract and Retain Productive employees. Supply chain applications that are old, show analytics that don’t allow the organization to make smart decisions. This makes the consumer applications inefficient and dis satisfactory.

Critical Issues to be Considered for supply chain modernization:

1. Define the desired endpoint, and plan the path that helps achieve it.
2. Finding the right supply chain partners to achieve the end point
3. The entire architecture has to be simple
4. Re-evaluate the process, that has outdated technology keeping the end goal in sight.
5. Fund change management. Cloud reduces the investment in infrastructure, the amount saved can be invested into change expertise.
6. Right resources into the evaluation team is a priority. The focus has to be placed on adopting the functionality of pace of the cloud integration. For this, proper team is required to look after the features and make goal-oriented decisions for taking the organization to higher level.
7. Supply chain mechanism to be structured.
8. Ways to approach Cloud into the supply chain. Flexible options have to be looked after to match the specific needs of the business. Areas that can deliver higher business value have to be started off with.
9. Cloud Solution. It is important to partner with the cloud technology is the effective and upgraded frequently as per the requirement of the business. The long-term cost of ownership has to ownership should also be considered.
10. Cloud vendor partnering. It is very necessary that global business requires Global solutions too. If the business is global, the cloud vendor should also be necessarily global. This helps in effective implementation and support partners Globally.
11. The cloud implementation in supply chain is a completely different way of doing business. It is not possible that every platform can be connected to the cloud. The applications are to be re-architectured for supply chain modernization.

Steps to get forward with Supply chain modernization :

1. Source the data for the provision of existing service. The data from supply chain needs to be analyzed and that data is used to improve the future solutions for the buyer patterns. The insight helps to leverage for the future to improve visibility and reduce development costs.
2. The digital transformation strategy. Adding in new technologies like IoT, AI, ML, and API management, for supply chain modernization is important for the Suppliers and they need to choose the right technology to work more efficiently.
3. Transformation to a Proactive supply chain. Emerging technologies are to be leveraged to transform the operations into more proactive nature. The data analytics can provide the insights to create such proactive supply chain that anticipates client requirements.
4. Develop a client requirement-based strategy. Customer experience on the buying has to be transformed to maintain a leverage against the competitors.