It’s not enough to have a great product to be successful. Companies also need an effective supply chain to be competitive. Ranga Bodla, director of vertical marketing, and Roman Bukary, vice president and general manager of Manufacturing and Wholesale/Distribution Industries at NetSuite, took a moment with our sister publication, Manufacturing Business Technology (MBT) to discuss supply chain management and how manufacturers can leverage it to be successful.
MBT: Talk about some of the biggest trends happening in supply chain management right now and what’s behind them.
Ranga: I’ll start off with the increasing complexity of supply chains. Years ago it was not uncommon for a large company to have a fairly far-flung supply chain with sourcing in Asia, design in the U.S. and manufacturing and distribution in different locations around the world. Now we see that happening for companies of all sizes. The notion that the world is flat is gone, so regardless of company size, supply chains are becoming more complex systems. It enables smaller companies to be more competitive. There can be a two person company now that has a supply chain that reaches the entire world. While there is increasing complexity in the supply chain, it also increases the reach of much smaller companies.
What that’s striving to is the need for companies to have flexibility in how they manage all of the different elements of their supply chain. The big thing that we preach at NetSuite is that the cloud provides that flexibility to manage that increasingly complex supply chain. Companies can leverage the best and lowest cost suppliers that enable them to deliver their product, while at the same time be efficient and have visibility into all of that.
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