In many ways the supply chain is the perfect type business to adopt cloud technologies. And in fact it may have been one of the first to do so when VANs began receiving, storing, and forwarding the very first orders between trading partners. So is it any surprise that IDC expects taht 80% of supply chain interactions will be cloud based by 2020?

If you’re paying any attention at all to news stories about supply chain you’re noticing that a single issue is vying for your attention. I’ve been mentioning blockchain myself quite a bit, but with a slightly jaded view. Here’s what I’m seeing most recently.

Computers that manage your supply chain activities are processing the data that controls your supply chain. It’s been part and parcel of supply chain management for decades. But it wasn’t till the last decade that companies have come to understand that if they stored that data they might be able to apply some analysis to it and learn how to optimize their operations. The challenge has been to find ways to consume the huge amounts of data and find things that could make a difference in real ways, a task far beyond what us humans can handle.