Extended Social Supply chain for the Enterprise 2.0 - Embrace or Perish!

Enterprises in today’s scenario are interacting with the supply chain in different ways than what they did a few years or decades earlier. Enterprises need to identify and cater to the Extended-Social-Supply-Chain(ESSC). This is in contrast to the value chain the enterprises earlier catered to, which was from the supplier’s- Supplier to Consumer’s-Consumer. Increasingly companies leveraging social media and networks to capture customers, deliver innovation and differentiate themselves in the marketplace.

The Extended social supply chain is characterized by multiple touch points, interactions with multiple stakeholders in the forward and backward integration and channels that were earlier unknown to the enterprises. Engineering enablers and value added services like device and enterprise mobility, embedded and integrated devices, context aware applications, enhanced contact centers, lean and smart hardware components, better automation. Information like verticals to service, revenue streams possible from social media etc would be critical to formulate the enterprise strategy.

From the enterprise’s perspective, the extended social supply can be viewed in a 3 tiered view, the bottom tier is the value chain, i.e supplier’s supplier to consumer’s consumer. The second layer is the engineering and technology enablers. The custom enterprise components like Competency networks, Sourcing, Exception management, Access Control, Enterprise mobility, Cloud Based Analytics etc form the top layer. This is the three tiered view that the enterprise needs to consider before taking any step in the social space.

These inputs make the social supply chain more sensitive to response, cost and variety parameters. Agility and speed of response in the extended social supply chain will increase, therefore enterprises need to be completely aware of the ecosystem to leverage any opportunities or minimize any damage in this space.

An attendee will gain a better appreciation of the players, interconnections and the interactions between the social supply chain. This would enable the players to be more agile, competitive and respond faster to the changes in the social supply chain. Any opportunities within the supply chain will also be utilized quickly and overall optimization of the supply chain will enhance the productivity of the same.

Akshay Raj Mathur is a Client Solution Manager at the Engineering group at Infosys, holding a post graduate certificate in management (executive management education program) from the Indian Institute of Management (IIM-K). He is currently pursuing specialization in Finance and Operations. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in engineering from Bangalore University. He has over 10 years of experience in Product Engineering area, working closely with communications products from global industry leaders. His areas of interest include business analysis, product engineering and value chain management. His paper on Digital Convergence has been recently published in the Infosys industry publication.

Jagdish Bhandarkar (jagdish_bhandarkar@infosys.com) is Principal and Steering member of Infosys Architecture Competency Board. He has evangelized several technical programs to improve thought leadership and technical skills of Architects. His current areas of research are Private Cloud Computing, Big Data and Agile Architectures. His book on Scrum  ethodology is slated to see daylight in 2012.