Modern supply chains are complex and dynamic. In order to stay competitive, organizations must be able to adapt quickly to disruptions and anticipate future changes. With ever-present challenges surrounding visibility, product complexity, data collection and analysis, and customer demand, supply chain organizations need to “build a level of agility, risk mitigation, and resilience into their value chains that enables rapid response,” according to a newly released white paper by IDC, a premier global provider of market intelligence for supply chain and technology markets.
IDC believes this is only possible by leveraging new Internet of Things (IoT) technologies by stating, “Fortunately, forward-thinking innovative companies have developed purpose-built supply chain visibility solutions, leveraging IoT technology, to finally achieve the requisite layer of visibility into the supply chain. For the first time in history, complex global supply chains have the capability to connect with their products and processes to achieve new levels of supply chain visibility.”
With this, IDC goes on to define a new market that leverages IoT-enabled analytics to drive unforeseen operational benefits in the supply chain. IDC explains that intelligent devices and sensors will be a major source of data in the supply chain. Unfortunately, raw data is riddled with duplicate, corrupt, and incomplete messages, and only an advanced analytics solution will be able to handle these challenges quickly and efficiently.
IDC estimates that the “global market for the Internet of Things (IoT) will maintain a compound annual growth rate of 16.9% to reach over $1.7 trillion from 2014 through 2020.” IDC explains that this new marketplace will develop and grow based on the demand for IoT technology. And with the demand and growth, IDC anticipates that IoT technologies will yield astonishing benefits, such as:
- “Leveraging sensor technology to improve supply chain visibility;
- Improving manufacturing productivity by enhanced analytics aligned with the manufacturing process;
- Connecting elements of the supply chain where there has been a traditional gap in fundamental coverage (e.g., in-transit item location, speed, delivery expectations);
- Improving supply chain planning through enhanced visibility and improved reliability of supply chain execution and performance metrics; and
- Achieving predictive and prescriptive insights relative to supply chain performance.”
In short, IDC explains that with a purpose-built, IoT-enabled analytics solution, all partners in a supply chain will obtain several key types of intelligence, such as true visibility and accurate estimated time of arrivals, risk identification and avoidance, predictive modeling to anticipate disruptions.
To learn how you can use IoT technologies to drive “unprecedented visibility” and “actionable insights” into your supply chains, download the white paper, IoT-Enabled Analytic Applications Revolutionize Supply Chain Planning and Execution. In it, IDC details industry-specific use cases and their resulting benefits.