The supply chain is really composed of several 'chains.' There's the supply chain we generally think of - the one that connects trading partners in order to move products from manufacturers to consumers. And there are the internal chains that move the various components of data between applications, departments, functions, and staff members.  Read more...

We talk a lot about integration. That is, integration of your supply chain components with your enterprise operations and ERP. I don't believe that anyone thinks this is something that can simply happen because it's the best thing to do. The complexity of each of the processes and components that have already been put in place, and the amount of effort each required just to get them to the point of functionality can bring tears to the eyes of those who struggled through them - or at least cause a twitch of pain. The point is that the first steps were not simple ones. Read more...

You already know that IoT is a term used to loosely identify items that have been imbued with enough intelligence and communication abilities to send messages across the internet. First of all, this means that these items are not human in the ways we normally think of humans using computers to send information via the Internet. But that doesn't mean that some of these 'things' can't be humans, or at least humans carrying with devices that do the communicating for them. The connections and the information are triggered by conditions as they change. Read more...