Recent Posts by Terri Hiskey

I attended the Gartner Supply Chain Conference in London a couple of weeks ago, and one of the topics that was discussed was the rise of robotics, especially in manufacturing and logistics. In April, a convoy of semi-automated smart trucks completed their first European cross-border trip, journeying from Sweden and southern Germany and ending in Rotterdam. This convoy consisted of a dozen self-driving trucks made by six of Europe’s largest manufacturers including DAF,...

Oracle is joining partner Avata for a webcast hosted by Supply Chain Digest! - Tuesday, August 2 at 11:30am EST/8:30am PST - Register now to attend  Supply Chain Trends and Opportunities We are at a critical juncture in the evolution of supply chain software.  User requirements, driven by developments such as omni-channel commerce, the need for real-time visibility, greater integration of supply chain planning and execution, and more are changing rapidly. At the same time, there...

In a historic vote last week, UK voters decided to leave the European Union. The implications of this decision are far reaching, and impacts everything from national security, immigration, the stock market and more. While the EU allows the UK up to 24 months to exit, smart supply chain professionals need to start thinking now about how this decision specifically affects their supply chains. APICS Director of Research, Jonathan Thatcher, wrote an informative blog post on this...

Recently, leading supply chain researcher SCM World announced that they have selected five finalists for their Supply Chain Breakthrough of the Year 2016 Award. Those finalists are AstraZenica, The Dow Chemical Company, Ecolab, Intel and Schneider Electric. While these five finalists represent different industries and projects, SCM World recognizes that they also share four distinct themes that define the way supply chain management is changing. Those four characteristics...

Last week I attended the annual Gartner Supply Chain Executive Conference, which took place in Scottsdale, Arizona. One interesting thing that stood out to me is the ever-growing importance of the customer experience. Companies are learning how to use technology to now personalize every single interaction that people have with a certain product or brand. An example of this is Coca-Cola. The photo featured in this posting is of a number of uniquely individual Coca-Cola labels...

Knowing what’s happening—or what’s not happening—is critical to your manufacturing organization and to your business. But in addition to visibility, you also need an integrated supply chain so you can communicate situations quickly and efficiently to other supply chain stakeholders, such as procurement and order management. And you need more information. Not just more data, but more insight into your processes so you can leverage the systems and analytics for visibility,...

This week, Andrew Hughes of LNS Research authored an interesting blog that included the chart below, which was produced as part of a "Metrics that Matter" survey. This survey is supported by industry group MESA, and is being executed by LNS Research. The interesting thing about this (as noted in Andrew's blog), is the fact that there is positive interest in implementing plant analytics as well as operations and manufacturing intelligence capabilities. Hughes writes that "Analy...

The North American Manufacturing Excellence Summit took place this week in Chicago. As part of that event, Oracle Chief Strategy Officer and Group Vice President for SCM Strategy, Jon Chorley, was interviewed about why the time to consider cloud is NOW for manufacturers. Read this brief to learn about the value that manufacturers gain by moving to cloud-based solutions including: IT cost reductions; greater user adoption up due to new, attractive, easy-to-use interfaces; and...

The Manufacturer, a UK-based publication, recently joined forces with Oracle to produce an eye-opening report on how UK manufacturers are gaining competitive advantages due to their investment in Industry 4.0 technologies such as the Internet of Things, big data and analytics. The study includes in-depth interviews with decision makers across different business functions from 250 organizations based in the UK. The understanding of the Industry 4.0 term, coined several years...