Resilient Supply Chain— stories and strategies that keep business moving

Send me a message The Covid 19 pandemic has seen a massive increase in the amount of PPE being used by both healthcare professionals, and by the general public. Much of this is discarded after use and goes straight to landfill. Lifecycle Revive want to fix that. They have come up with a way to take this medical waste, convert it to plastic pellets, and then use those pellets back into PPE once aga...

Send me a message In this the fourth episode of the industry 4 on Fridays series I talk about the importance of partners, and the need to extend beyond your factory walls for a more resilient supply chain. This is the first of a series of Industry 4.0 podcasts dealing with partnerships. Upcoming episodes will feature some of our partners talking about their Industry 4.0 experiences. In this episod...

Send me a message Supply chain disruption is becoming the norm rather than the exception. Whether it is cracks in the Hernando do Soto bridge , ships getting stuck in the Suez Canal, or global pandemics, supply chains need to be more agile than ever. To talk through some of the implications of this I invited Mike Snape of SAP partner company Oliver Wight to come on the podcast and chat about this...

Send me a message In this episode 3 of the Industry 4 on Fridays series I look into the role of standards, standards organizations, and open source in Industry 4.0. To dig into his topic I invited Erich Clauer to come on the podcast. Erich is Vice President, Head of Industry Standards & Open Source, so Erich is uniquely qualified to delve into this. We had an excellent conversation and, as is...

Send me a message Lenovo has one of the largest supply chains in the world shipping 3-4 items per second so I was delighted when Dr. Ajay Dholakia (aka @ajaydholakia on Twitter) agreed to come on the podcast to discuss Lenovo's supply chain and how digitisation has helped them. We had a wide-ranging conversation covering many aspects of supply chain digitisation, and the technologies used (ML...

Send me a message And today we have the second episode of our Industry 4.0 for Fridays. In this episode Alex Altermann and Nils Herzberg talk about bilateral, and multilateral partnerships, what they are, why they are, and where to from here with them. Both Alex and Nils referenced the Industry 4.Now Experience page on the sap.com website, so don't forget to check that out. We had an excellen...

Send me a message SAP recently announced a new way of accessing our S4 technology for Supply Chains, without having to already have the full S4 suite for ERP. To find out more about this announcement, the advantages for supply chain professionals of this announcement, and how to access it I invited Sandy Markin to come on the podcast. We had an excellent conversation and, as always, I learned load...

Send me a message On today's podcast we're kicking off a new Industry 4.0 on Fridays mini-series - themed broadly on the importance of partnerships, and the partner ecosystem in Industry 4.0. For this inaugural episode I invited Dominik Metzger , Head of Product Management | Manufacturing and Industrial IOT at SAP, and Nils Herzberg , Global Head Strategic Partnerships & Industry 4.0...

Send me a message Today Monday May 3rd is a bank holiday in many parts of Europe so, I'm keeping the podcast short today. No guest, just me, and I'm talking about the upcoming ASUG Best Practices SAP Supply Chain virtual conference which takes place on May 11-12th. I mention that event in this episode because I will be giving the opening keynote on the morning of May 12th on the topic of...

Send me a message SAP and Oxford Economics have released a report on sustainability in supply chains called " The Sustainable Supply Chain Paradox: Balancing the bottom line with the green line ". The report drew on the responses of over 1,000 supply chain executives globally to a detailed survey on the topic, and the results were enlightening. I invited my colleague Richard Howells (aka...

Send me a message I try to cover as many aspects of the supply chain as possible on this podcast - everything from planning, engineering, manufacturing, warehousing logistics, delivery, but to-date I haven't featured anyone talking about field service management, so this episode finally fixes that! I invited Craig Blumberg to come on the podcast to talk about what is happening in field servic...

Send me a message I realised recently that many episodes of this podcast are very Europe/North America centric, so I set out to get a different perspective. I invited Dr Bashar Eljawhari a partner at PwC, and his colleague Haitham Khalifa , Director Enterprise Solutions at PwC Middle East to come on the podcast to discuss supply chains in their region, how they have fared in the last year, and why...

Send me a message Supply chains are coming under increasing scrutiny and with the advent of social media, any issues can quickly very quickly go viral affecting a company's reputation, and share price. Diginex Solutions is one organisation using technology to help companies ensure that workers rights are not impinged in their supply chains. I invited Leanne Melnyk , Diginex' Global Head...

Send me a message We had a couple of recent episodes around warehousing, robots, and their place in supply chains, so when I came across Fulfilld , I knew they'd be a great fit for the podcast. Fortunately Michael Pytel , co-founder and CTO of Fulfilld was happy to oblige and he came on the podcast to talk about they help organisations with intelligent task management in warehouses. We had an...

Send me a message 2020 saw a massive global shift to e-commerce, with consequent supply chain disruption, and that shift is here to stay. The big challenge for many organisation is how to integrate their legacy systems to the cloud without compromising those on-premise systems into which they have significant investments. To discuss this dilemma, I invited Mahesh Rajasekharan , CEO of Cleo , a com...

Send me a message My guest on today's episode of the podcast is Howard Tiersky . Howard is CEO of FROM, The Digital Transformation Agency . Howard is also the author of the Wall Street Journal bestseller Winning Digital Customers - The Antidote to Irrelevance , so I invited him to come on the podcast to discuss best practices in digital transformation, and he did not disappoint. We had an exc...

Send me a message Child sexual abuse is an horrific crime. Fortunately technology can help detect abuse, prosecute the perpetrators, and protect the victims, and potential victims. One company working in this space is called Netclean . They have developed software that can detect known child sexual abuse images on an organisation's network of computers - protecting the organisation, protectin...

Send me a message I'm on vacation this week (March 29th 2021), so this is the only episode of the podcast that I'm publishing this week. Normal programming will resume next Monday, April 5th. In this episode I quickly go back over some recent episodes (there are now 118 episodes of this podcast published!) so take the opportunity to go back and listen to some you may have missed.  And I...

Send me a message Weather has a huge impact on supply chains - whether it is last month's cold snap in Texas, the drought in Taiwan and it's effect on the semiconductor industry, or simply rainy vs sunny days impact on the sale of umbrellas or ice cream, so I thought it was time to see what we could do about that. I invited IBM's Global Director, Enterprise Weather Strategy Paul Wal...

Send me a message We don't often think about the global food supply chain - it is just there, invisibly making sure we can get food on our table in good condition. To give you an idea of some of the ways technology is helping this hugely important supply chain I invited Naeem Zafar , CEO & Co-Founder of TeleSense . Naeem is on a mission to digitise the global grain supply chain. Why? list...

Send me a message Jan Burian heads up IDC's Manufacturing Insights team in EMEA and he recently published two interesting articles in IndustryWeek - one on operations managers , and the second on automation . With that in mind, I invited him to come on the podcast to talk about technology in supply chains, the role of automation, and how digital transformation projects are progressing. We had...

Send me a message SAP just released its 2021 Digital Supply Chain Strategy document , so I invited Franz Hero , SAP's Head of Development, Digital Supply Chain to come on the podcast to talk about it. We talked about the what, the why, and the what next of this document - I think you'll enjoy it. If you have any comments/suggestions or questions for the podcast - feel free to leave me a...

Send me a message On today's episode of the Digital Supply Chain podcast I welcomed back Neil Patel of MSCG and one of his customers, Sam Carter , GDT 's Director of Warehouse and Logistics. We had a fascinating conversation about how Warehousing has changed in the last year, and where things are headed, best practices in warehousing, and some out of the box thinking (using facilities to...

Send me a message Adding robots and cobots to Extended Warehouse Management (EWM) is typically a large and time consuming project spanning months at a minimum. So, SAP has developed an open source solution called Warehouse Robotics . With Warehouse Robotics, adding robots to EWM typically takes minutes, instead of months. How is that possible? To answer that question, I invited Dr Albrecht Ricken...

Send me a message With the world moving rapidly to online ordering and Ecommerce - data visibility in transport and logistics is becoming more and more important. With this in mind SAP has released a new solution called Advanced Shipping and Receiving. To find out more about this I invited Joerg Michaelis and Peter Flensberg to come on the podcast to tell us all about it. We had a fascinating conv...