Supply chain management is one of the most prominent use cases for digital transformation and automation projects. Enterprises strive for an agile framework that allows them to adjust their supply chain processes to political, meteorological and market requirements in real-time. Nonetheless, seamless supply chain collaboration has remained an elusive goal for the past 25 years. Enterprises still struggle to validate and integrate the data necessary for good decisions.

Brad Householder proposes a decision-centric approach to solve this challenge. He shares his insights from his past projects, and – most importantly – explain how enterprises can become decision-centric organizations ready for automation and agility.

About Brad Householder
Brad Householder has over 35 years of experience in operations and supply chain management roles in industry and consulting.  Before retiring from PwC, Brad held numerous leadership roles in PwC’s Operations Management consulting practice, including responsibility for PwC’s thought leadership in Operations.   Prior to his consulting career with PRTM and PwC, Brad served in research, engineering, manufacturing, and management roles at Ashland, Procter & Gamble, Corning, and Ceramics Process Systems.  He has published multiple articles, and was a key contributor to both editions of the critically acclaimed book, Strategic Supply Chain Management: The 5 Disciplines for Top Performance. He continues to be an active leader in the field of supply chain management as a long-time volunteer and adviser with APICS and the Supply Chain Council, serving on the Board of Directors for both organizations, and as the global Board Chair of APICS in 2018.

About Hans-Christian Brockmann

In this webcast Brad and Chris will discuss:

• why neither traditional ERP systems nor the trendy Big Data approach will solve the challenge of decision-centric supply chain management
• how enterprise can add agility, flexibility, speed and precision to their supply chain management
• how the DIKW pyramid (data, information, knowledge, wisdom) is a key concept to this
• and finally, how to turn your disparate data into good decisions.

Enterprises are looking to achieve pervasive automation. This includes not only commodity tasks but also complex knowledge based tasks. Yet they are stuck in an IT quagmire leading to complexity, siloed data and hidden semantics. Ultimately this effectively prevents what is commonly called digital transformation. Only a few large enterprises like Google, Amazon, and Uber have made the mindset and capability transition to turn data and knowledge into a strategic advantage. Their roadmap is build on data-centric principles. What does your roadmap look like?

After their first exploration of why we got into this quagmire in the first place, Chris Brockmann and Dave McComb return for a second session to bridge the gap between problem and solution.

In this webcast you will learn:

• what has to fundamentally change in enterprise IT to drive digital transformation
• how to free data from their silos
• how to restore sanity to your enterprise information system(s)
• how to achieve business agility with data centricity

Every year, a majority of US$ 3.8 trillion spent in IT projects is wasted. Still companies are following the same path over and over again that increases IT complexity, siloed data and operational costs. But as digital natives like Apple, Google and Amazon have proved, successful digitalization is all about agile source integration, easy data access as well as reliable data use.

In this live webcast Chris Brockmann and Dave McComb discuss what fundamentally prevents companies from achieving data agility and digital maturity. They argue that it‘s not despite established best practices in IT management but because of it. Reflecting on their own practical experiences in large-scale IT projects, they pinpoint the root cause of what they call the software wasteland quagmire.

In this webcast you will learn:

• why IT costs have been skyrocketting over the last years (and will continue to do so),
• why hardly any large IT migration or modernization project achieves its objectives,
• why established IT best practices are no longer fit for today‘s requirements of digital transformation, and
• what application-centricity has got to do with it.