Brand-owner advice: Keynotes at Kinaxis conference advocate aligning demand-SCM with business strategies
By Manufacturing Business Technology Staff -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 11/10/2008 12:32:00 PM
Kinaxis—provider of the on-demand RapidResponse service that gives multi-enterprise manufacturers collaborative and integrated demand-supply planning, monitoring, and response capabilities—recently held its annual user conference, Kinexions '08, in Chicago.
Attendees of the two-day event included some of the world’s largest brand owners and manufacturers, with collective revenue totaling more than $537 billion.
The keynote speakers for the event included Shoshanah Cohen, director of PRTM’s Global Supply Chain Innovation practice, and Larry Lapide, Ph.D, director of demand management at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for Transportation and Logistics (CTL), and research director for the Demand Management Solutions Group—of which Kinaxis is a member.
Their respective keynote addresses identified demand and supply chain management as a competitive advantage and corporate business strategy enabler, with remarks underscoring the need for companies to improve collaboration between demand and supply-side management, as well as use supply chain management to further strategic corporate goals. (Review the video of Lapidetalking about the industry.)
Kinaxis customers shared best practices on leveraging RapidResponse as a single solution that could solve a multitude of their diverse supply chain management challenges. Case study presentations were offered by a select group of market leaders: EMC, John Deere, Qualcomm, Raytheon, and Teradyne.
For its users, RapidResponse is serving as a platform for continuous demand-supply alignment, enabling them to replace inefficient legacy supply chain planning systems, ad hoc processes, and multiple spreadsheets. Companies are focused on leveraging RapidResponse to support action on multiple fronts to, as one user phrases it, continually promote “more users–more uses–more value.”
Throughout the conference, the need for integrating demand and supply management was a prevalent theme, and was overwhelmingly supported by the results of a survey completed by attendees, whereby 63 percent of respondents rated the importance of integrating planning, monitoring, and response within their organization as “extremely important”. Incorporating collaborative insight and human judgment into supply chain processes also was heavily emphasized and reinforced by survey results, with 90 percent of respondents rating its value as “important” or “extremely important.”
Learn more about the event highlights and related discussions at the Kinaxis blog.
