March Madness in Supply Chain Management

In the past 3 weeks I have attended 2 excellent supply chain events in North America. The 2 events were the Supply Chain Customer Value Network (CVN) meeting in Newtown Square and the SAP Insider Logistics & Supply Chain Conference in Orlando. They attracted over 1000 Supply Chain executives and practitioners and 80+ presentations from SAP experts, consultants and most importantly, experts from the SAP customer base.  

This is the 1^st of 2 articles I will be writing to give an overview of these conferences. In this article I will cover the SAP Supply Chain Customer Value Network Event.

SAP Supply Chain Customer Value Network (CVN) March 6^th & 7^th 

The event kicked off by the event chair, Dave Strothmann in front of a “standing room only” audience of over 300 people attended from 97 individual companies. Dave introduced the SAP team assembled to help the audience and thanked the numerous partners who supported the event.

Dave also introduced a new Supply Chain Survey that has been initiated in 2012.  This survey is designed for SAP SCM customers to quickly complete in 5 and 15 minutes (depending on the number of SAP SCM modules implemented). The results of this survey will be aggregated and used by SAP Solution Management when planning future product roadmaps and evaluating investment decisions. I encourage you to click on the link to take part in the discussion.

The opening session was followed by five heavily attended and very interactive hands-on workshops:

• Supply Network Collaboration: Deep-Dive Workshop
• Extended Warehouse Management: Deep-Dive Workshop
• Inventory Optimization: Best Practices Workshop
• Transportation Management: Deep-Dive Workshop
• Next Generation Sales and Operations Planning Powered by SAP HANA

Day 2 was kicked off with a keynote from Hans Thalbauer, Senior VP of Solution Management for SCM and PLM.  Hans talked about some of the business trends and realities affecting supply chain executives today, and how these challenges are influencing the SAP supply chain solution and future roadmap.

The audience then brock into three tracks of presentations focused on

• Supply Chain Planning

• Supply Chain Execution

• Supply Chain Collaboration and analytics

These tracks included presentations from several SAP experts and customers including:

• Conair
• Dow Corning
• Harry & David
• Indigo Books & Music
• JMC Steel Group 
• Medtronic, Inc.
• Novus International Inc.
• NVIDIA
• Virco Manufacturing Corporation

Several articles that have been written to date about some of the end user presentations.

• In an article entitled “Novus uses SAP Supply Chain Performance Management to jazz up dashboards”, Todd Morrison from SearchSAP wrote about the deployment of SAP Supply Chain Performance Management ( SAP SCPM) to allows users to monitor their supply chain strategy using scorecards and dashboards in conjunction with preset KPIs.
• In a 2^nd piece in SearchSAP Todd also wrote about the Indigo Books story and how the  “Bookseller picks SAP extended warehouse management”.
• Thomas Wailgum from ASUGNews.com  talked about several customer stories and provided a summary of the event in  “SAP Supply Chain Management: 5 Customer Priorities in 2012”.

If you are a supply chain executive using SAP in North America this event is a great opportunity to meet your peers from a multitude of industries and backgrounds. Everywhere I turned there were conversations and discussions going on and everybody seemed happy to share their experiences with others.

There are 2 more CVN’s in the works for Chicago and Palo Alto in 2012.  Watch this space for more information……