Survey Results: Biggest objectives for a Supply Chain Professional

Few weeks back, I posted a survey on this blog and as per my practice of sharing the results of the survey with the readers, I am summarizing the survey results as well as some of the comments that I got on the survey.  The objective of the surevy was to find out the most critical objectives of a supply chain professional to make their supply chain most efficient for their organization. 

A whopping 42% of the respondents mentioned "Reduction in Lead Times" as their most important and critical goal for this year as they would want to increase their responsiveness to ever changing dynamics of demand in market and at this time when going beyond SLAs is the need of the hour to stay ahead of the competition, this measure is their top priority.  The next 2 most important goals that came out from the survey are: 1) Supplier Collaboration  - To have an expanded supply chain visibility and de-risk the operations from supplier failures and 2) Improvement in forecasts - To optimize inventory and to reduce working capital as well as obsolete inventory.

The other major objectives that experts from across the globe mentioned, are:

• Enhance spend analysis capabilities
• Better auction capabilities
• Reduction in stock out frequency
• Reduction in physical and system inventory
• Improve communication with customers and suppliers

The total number of votes that I got on this survey...

Results of Latest Survey

I often get queries from readers that how can they get to see the results of the older surveys that are run on this site and as a result I have decided to post the results of each survey in this site so that these can be referenced by everybody at a later time also.

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To startwith, here is the result of the last survey that was to find out how many releases away are companies, from their ERP vendor's latest release. The results are:

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• 14% companies are at par with ERP Vendor latest release
• 38% organizations are only one release behind
• 19% of them are 2 to 3 releases behind
• Again 19% are 3 to 5 releases behind
• And just 9% are more than 5 releases behind

The total number of votes we got on this survey was 221.

This means that though more than 50% organizations that are using ERP, are either upto date or are only 1 release behind, which is a startling fact. On the other hand, rest of them which is also close to about 50%, are more than 2 releases behind and sooner than later they need to move to the next release. Hmmmm, so we all see some business there, right?

Why ERP upgrades lost momentum in H1 2009

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We saw that in first half of 2009, the numbers of ERP upgrades were much less than the same period last year for obvious reasons of ongoing recession. But what is more surprising is that the ratio of upgrades to new implementations also went down...Does this means, while the ERPless organizations are going ahead with their plans to introduce ERPs but the ERPpowered organizations are exercising caution in upgrading to the latest release??

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Let me gather some first hand data using an opinion poll (provided above) before jumping to any conclusion on new trends.

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All ERP users & consultants are welcome to cast their votes.

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