"The supply chain has been forged out of the need to do business faster, more accurately and cost-effectively," says Dave Macdonald, National Pre-Sales Manager of J.D. Edwards SA, a leading supplier of ERP and supply chain solutions. "But the supply chain itself is changing dramatically from an internally focused hierarchy made up of disparate technologies all trying desperately to talk to each other. It is becoming an outwardly focused system extending processes and systems beyond the walls of the enterprise to include every company in the link capable of adding value to the chain."
Macdonald was commenting on the upcoming Collaborative Supply Chain Conference to be held from the 20th to 22nd of September 2000. J.D. Edwards is the primary sponsor of the conference and Piet Buyck, Vice President:
Supply Chain, at J.D. Edwards will be the keynote speaker. Says Macdonald, "People want to know why we need another conference to address an issue that has already been addressed in the past. The answer is simple - the times have changed, the paradigm has shifted and the technology is now available that will allow us to collaborate across the supply chain."
According to Macdonald, "What most ERP users want to know is if ERP is dead. The answer is no. In fact it is alive and well, growing and maturing. As an ERP vendor, J.D. Edwards evolved its focus on providing companies with solutions designed to add value to their systems and processes while enabling them to extend them externally to the supply chain. The way companies do business has changed dramatically with suppliers looking at electronic exchanges, or e-markets, to create and maintain effective supply chains using inter-enterprise workflows. The ability to enable these supply chains to achieve a high level of optimisation by allowing different systems to talk to each other is the next challenge facing the ERP industry."
"Historically, ERP and EAI (enterprise application integration) provided the building blocks for the supply chain. They still do but their role has taken a backseat, replaced by the need to move business processes such as demand planning, fulfilment and revenue collection throughout the supply chain instead of keeping it within the enterprise. We now have supply chains consisting of, for example, raw material suppliers, secondary and tertiary manufacturers, wholesalers and retailers competing with other supply chains with similar structures, all of which are fighting to improve the flow of communications across their respective chains. The winners will obviously be the ones who can talk to each other the most effectively. A message-based architecture is the key to supply chain survival, providing each link in the chain not only with the means to communicate but to collaborate in Real Time across the entire supply hierarchy."
Adds Macdonald, "It is the new world of business. The difference that J.D. Edwards offers is that it is the only ERP vendor with the right level of architecture. It has gone out and selected and integrated the components that cover the broadest range of requirements and developed the kind of technology that gives people the freedom to choose their partners in the supply chain by allowing them to communicate regardless of the systems used."
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