According to the 13th Annual Global CEO Survey, CEOs are confident about overall business conditions but still have a number of concerns, many of which pertain to the supply chain. Some of these issues include:

• Energy costs
• Potential Protectionism as a Barrier to Trade
• Climate Change Issues
• Scarcity of Commodities
• Supply Chain Security

As a result of these anxieties, supply chain risk mitigation will be very high on the CEO agenda over the next couple of years. In fact, a whopping 41% of those surveyed reported plans for major changes in that area.  As never before, supply chain leaders will be challenged to reduce risks in new ways, even implementing some risk avoidance mechanisms that will actually add to supply chain costs.

In addition to attacking the issue around risks, CEOs will create completely different strategies from years past as they anticipate a “new normal” from consumers. In the technology, retail/wholesale, consumer goods and transportation/logistics arenas, consumers are expected to not only relentlessly seek lower prices and better value, but also place a high level of importance on a company’s sustainability record. To meet these consumer expectations, companies will focus on reducing cost operation plans, taking a product’s country of origin into consideration when planning outsourcing initiatives, and sinking a significant amount of investments into the supply chain.

In sum, many Executives are optimistic about the future, with 50% expressing confidence in their prospects over the next three years. And as change is viewed as inevitable by the majority,  many CEOs are reformulating their strategies to address such issues as supply chain risk mitigation and modified customer buying behavior.

What are your thoughts? Are CEOs focusing on the right issues? What strategies would you recommend for the next 3 years?

Read the full article here.

Attendees arrived in Chicago on Monday for registration and the first user lab of the three day event. On Tuesday, GXS Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer Bobby Patrick talked to participants about the recent merger of GXS and Inovis and what to expect of the new GXS. Ian Jarman, the second guest speaker of the event, discussed the present and future of the IBM I platform and most notably, how adoption for IBM Power Systems now exceeds both Sun and HP in the Unix server marketplace.

In addition to the breakout sessions and product demos, several customers shared their experiences, including Dolores Soldale from Costco Wholesale and Joel Quisenberry of BCBG Maxazria. Participants also had the opportunity to network at the event’s cocktail hour on Tuesday evening, and rumor has it that many attendees were up late socializing.

On behalf of GXS, we’d like to thank all of our great customers that made this event such a success. We hope we’ll see you next year!

GXS Chief Marketing Officer Bobby Patrick stood before 90 attendees this morning to discuss the recent merger of Inovis and GXS as well as answer questions from participants. Following Bobby, IBM Power Systems Software Manager Ian Jarman talked to the group about the present and future of the IBM i platform. The rest of today’s festivities will include breakout sessions and multiple user labs followed by a cocktail hour this evening. 

 Here are a few pictures from activities thus far.

The registration booth

The first user lab on Monday

GXS Chief Marketing Officer Bobby Patrick

Manager of IBM Power Systems Software, Ian Jarman

Stay tuned as we bring you more updates from the conference over the next couple of days.

This morning, GXS CEO Bob Segert stood before members of the former Inovis headquarters to introduce himself and share with us his go-forward strategy. Bob painted his vision of a powerful B2B integration service provider genuinely dedicated to its customers and equipped with a global reach around its software and services.

We here at Inovis, a GXS company are fired up about the opportunities afforded by this merger and are enthusiastic about the unique presence that GXS will bring to the market.

For more information, view the press release.

The third video, shown below, discusses the perils of putting your business services in the cloud.

• The proliferation of cloud computing, including software as a service (SaaS), is driving additional forms of B2B integration and outsourcing services, to address cloud-to-cloud and cloud-to-on-premises integration projects, in addition to traditional B2B projects, such as supply chain integration.

• During the next two years, B2B integration and outsourcing services will grow by at least 20%.

 To learn more about the role of integration as a service (IaaS) in B2B Integration and Outsourcing as well as Gartner’s recommendations for successfully utilizing these services, read the full report.

Each day is guaranteed to be jam packed with networking, hands on learning and informative sessions led by Inovis support and development professionals. These workshops will cover:

• Up-to-date information on Inovis’ most recent product features.
• Current and future trends of EDI and XML in B2B commerce.
• Valuable insights into how to effectively manage your company’s e-commerce efforts.
• Tips and tricks for using TLi and Biz products more effectively.

The conference will be held at the Hilton Chicago/Northbrook and the hotel is now offering a special room rate until May 24^th. Visit the conference’s hotel information page for details.

To learn more about the upcoming conference or register for this exciting event, visit the official Inovis TLi Conference page.

Last week, I teed up the concept of the Social Supply Chain, and the five building blocks for harnessing the value of trading partner communities.

social network (http://darmano.typepad.com)

The umbrella concept is driven from the abrupt and dramatic reversal of automation in the supply chain and the accompanying need to weave people into the B2B integration process, particularly across exception management and governance.  It’s a counter-intuitive concept, no doubt, given the last decade’s march towards automation.

Today, we’ll dive into Integration Services, the first of the five pillars.

Integration Revisited.

In the not-so-distant past, supply chains were glued together by B2B gateway software, ERP adaptors, value-added-networks (VANs) and specialized marketplaces.    These integration types aren’t going away any time soon.  In fact, integration providers like Inovis and GXS continue to deliver a healthy set of VAN services to tens of thousands of organizations.

These integration processes made sense then (and still do today) since they were excellent at automating repeatable B2B e-commerce processes, such as invoice delivery.  The underlying reliability and scalability of VANs and B2B gateways help companies expand transactions and accelerate time-to-market with fewer staff.  This is good, basic ROI.

But while these traditional integration approaches will continue well into the future, customers are dealing with a changing integration landscape.

Pink Laptops and Geo-Staged Inventory.

Most supply chains are dealing with the effects of globalization.  New markets are opening up for distribution and increasingly smaller components of core processes are being outsourced to partners.  For many of these offshore partners, it is often cheaper to insert people into the integration process than it is to build and maintain an integration infrastructure.

Additionally, as product cycle times and lifespans shrink across virtually all categories, there’s an associated shortening of partner relationships and quickening of process changes.  These transient and highly variable processes put pressure on organizations to maintain a healthy community of partners (and potential partners) and drive a dramatic increase in community communication and education requirements.

Increasing competition and more sophisticated business models are also driving significant variability in process execution.  Distributors and manufacturers in high tech and consumer electronics, for example, are now offering a dizzying array of custom manufacturing and fulfillment options and services that can be brought to bear on an order-by-order basis.  Want your computer to be pink?  Your corporate OS image pre-loaded?  Your inventory pre-staged geographically to support a “deliver no earlier than” product launch date?  These value added services and associated complexities require oversight, visibility and management by multiple organizations, collaborating with one another in real time, with little margin for error.

At the same time that channel masters and their ecosystem of global partners are raising the bar, government and economic forces are increasing compliance, governance, and risk management constraints.  Today, integration teams must deal with country-by-country e-Invoicing requirements, HIPAA, CPSC, CTPAT, and Carbon credits, along with SOX and older mandates. Almost all of these compliance rules require the intervention of vendor managers, finance staff, and logistics teams to ensure the smooth flow of goods.

Of course, all of this is happening in the context of cloud adoption and the ever-increasing ecosystem of SaaS based services.

The Rise of Tightly Knit Integration Services

The emerging reality of B2B integration is a tightly knit set of easily assembled integration services.  These SaaS integration services are composed of :

• Well defined APIs
• Normalized and published semantics
• Flexible deployment options (cloud, private cloud, hybrid cloud, geographically colocated)
• Open ecosystems
• Declarative orchestration

How Social is Woven into B2B Integration Services

So how is social being woven into these integration services to solve the challenges of today’s supply chain complexity?

We are seeing the creation of “socially augmented integration flows”.  The right knowledge and community expertise is getting sourced real time and then injected into the execution of a business process.  Typically, they are providing insight and governance, but often, they are deciding how the process will be executed.  For example, a sourcing manager may be inserted into the ordering process to decide which supplier should be used to fulfill a custom order from a customer.

We are also seeing “social substitution”, the strong need for people to be able to be plugged into any step in a business process.  As the complexity, criticality, or number of partners increases, the likelihood that a person will be at the other end of a request increases.  Inside of Inovis, we jokingly refer to this as “Erik’s Law of Social Substitution.” The effects of is law can be seen in the following graph:

Integration ecosystems are also taking a page from the social networking space, with “social transparency” making its way in the supply chain.  The need for transparency and collaboration between multiple tiers of a supply chain resembles the complexity of a person’s social graph.  This relationship and integration graph is getting externalized and managed in a similar way as LinkedIn is managing the graph of personal relationships.  While this does not reduce the complexity of the supply chain, it represents a tool and vocabulary for dealing with it.

Next on the list? Pillar #2, Shared Data Ownership

The next post in the series will cover “Shared Data Ownership” and how the need for openness has blurred the lines of data ownership in supply chains and increased the need to share contextual data across trading partners.

How are your integration needs changing?

The second video, shown below, explains why scripting can cause security issues and how to avoid these risks.

It’s a good snapshot of why Dell went with a cloud services platform to support their 1,900 trading partners.  Some quick stats: Dell consolidated three legacy platforms and decommissioned more than 200 servers.

In case you’re one of those “words-not-video” kind of people, here’s a pdf of the case study.