ketteQ’s Product Chief Nikhil Jain Shares His Views on Top Trends for 2022, Best Practices for Supply Chain Leaders

Nikhil Jain, Head of Product and Client Acquisition for ketteQ, predicts supply chain companies will remain under pressure through the first half of 2022 as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to disrupt business. In this snapshot Q&A, Nikhil gives his take on how supply chain executives can mitigate risk and improve visibility with a stronger command of technology and an eye for trends on the horizon.

Q. Given all of the challenges that have disrupted supply chains in 2021, what do you expect to happen in 2022 and beyond?    

A. New, more contagious COVID-19 variants are emerging and the situation for the industry is fluid. I expect that the production and logistics industries will continue to remain under pressure for the first half of 2022. But even beyond that, companies need to factor in the risk of such disruptions when designing and managing their supply chains. That process has to start now.

Q. Based on current industry challenges, what are the best practices supply chain executives can implement to improve visibility and decision making?  

A. Technology initiatives required to improve visibility and decision-making need clear leadership. Here the role of the Chief Supply Chain Officer (CSCO) will gain renewed importance. While traditionally the CSCO’s role has been limited to improving efficiency and automation in supply chain, there is now an expectation that CSCOs need to develop a better understanding of supply chain risks and have strategies and plans in place for risk mitigation. 

While traditionally the CSCO’s role has been limited to improving efficiency and automation in supply chain, there is now an expectation that CSCOs need to develop a better understanding of supply chain risks and have strategies and plans in place for risk mitigation. Technologies like a supply chain control tower can be used to identify where a company’s supply chain is most exposed and vulnerable. This can help companies better predict variability in procurement lead times, for example, along with more efficiently grasping the percentage of long lead time components, or the percentage of single-source components, or the percentage of components sourced from a particular country, among other key variables.  

In these uncertain times, having an accurate and timely picture of demand is critical.  Due to disruptions, historical demand may not be a good indicator of the future.  For B2B companies, having visibility into the sales pipeline and incorporating that information into the demand planning process becomes critical.  

Product life cycles also are increasingly becoming shorter. For many technology products that life cycle is usually 6-12 months.  So, it is important that when a new model is launched, there is daily tracking of sales data, which can be used to project the future sales and allow the company to course correct on the supply side as quickly as possible to avoid supply shortages or excess and obsolescence costs.

This leads to the next important best practice of S&OP, which is typically a monthly process.  With the level of automation available, companies should look at making this a weekly process so they can affect supply and demand interventions sooner, and avoid huge losses resulting from either missed demand opportunities or too much excess inventory.  This is especially relevant as product life cycles shorten.

Q. What are you personally most curious or excited about when it comes to industry trends on the horizon?  

A. Being in the technology business, I am most excited about trends where technology can provide serious value. Here are some quick examples and pressing questions facing the industry.

• Omnichannel Retail: Allowing consumers to order and return products and services from any location begs the question – how can supply chain decision support platforms make recommendations on where to position inventory?
• Reverse Logistics, Circular Supply Chains, and Sustainability: How can returns, repairs, etc..be effectively factored into inventory decisions? E-commerce purchases result in greater returns and these returns need to be tracked. To grow sustainability in this area, companies need the ability to track the status of returns and provide decision support on when and how they can be recycled or reused.
• Use of AI/ML and Big Data Analytics: For supply chain management, new technology can detect equipment failure remotely, correlate failure codes with parts usage, and conduct demand sensing based on external variables, such as weather, customer sentiment, special events etc…This will continue to be transformational for companies.
  

Q. How is ketteQ positioned to respond to those trends?

A. ketteQ has built a supply chain platform that represents leading-edge technology and, as such, is able to leverage the superior integration, high-performance databases, and AI/ML technology needed for decision support and business analytics functions to provide planning at speeds that bring life to the digital twin concept.

The only supply chain planning, automation, and execution platform built on Salesforce, ketteQ is built from the ground up to handle the needs of both forward logistics and reverse logistics. Our team has decades of experience in developing supply chain platforms for both forward planning and spares planning, where reverse logistics is a critical piece. All the knowledge has gone into creating a single platform that can address the needs of the future circular economy.  

We offer a flexible demand model designed for an omnichannel environment where demand of each channel can be forecasted separately, and inventory can be optimally allocated based on the various omnichannel distribution models being used, such as order online pick up from a store, order online return to a store, etc…

The platform also has incorporated tech improvements that enable analysis, simulation, and decision support in real-time.  While planning used to run as a batch process for hours and days, and it once took weeks to analyze different business scenarios, today’s technology holds the promise to do all of that in minutes.  

The concept of digital twins and the ability to analyze different scenarios is under-utilized and has great potential to transform supply chain decision-making of the future. While many larger corporations have adopted supply chain automation, giving them the ability to automate routine supply chain tasks, such as order promising, allocation, purchase order creation, and approval, for example, midsized to small companies can do the same.

Q. What tech advances do you see on the horizon that have the potential to transform supply chains? What stands in the way of that transformation?

A. Technology has not yet delivered its promise in supply chain transformation.  Most of the technology required to solve the supply chain problems of today exists, such as high-performance databases, AI/ML, big data analytics, and UI workflow tools, but companies continue to struggle with the adoption of supply chain systems due to insufficient focus on the supply chain vendors in packaging these technologies in a manner that makes it easy for consumption.  No promise of ROI can be fulfilled if users don’t adopt the system.

At ketteQ we have a “user first” approach and, while we leverage all the technologies mentioned before, we ensure that we keep our users front and center and enable workflows that allow them to use the tool at their level of sophistication.

Advanced technology does not have to be complex. I take inspiration from companies like Apple which have built trillion-dollar companies by focusing on the customer.  Enterprise software should be packaged and delivered like consumer goods.  Technology should be transparent to the user. For example, forecast automation has been around since computers have existed, but over time it has become easier for our customers to get data in and out of forecasting systems and try out different algorithms and approaches. The basic science behind it has changed very little.

Ultimately, we want to deliver science to the user in a manner that is not intimidating, but actually fun.

Similarly, we want to provide enterprise systems that users enjoy using. Users should be able to trust the data in the system, they should enjoy using the system and the system should provide value to the clients by making recommendations that improve targeted business metrics.

Our goal is to continue to enhance the level of automation of supply chains, and that is only possible if the users trust the system. Just as any of us would not sit in an autonomous car unless we completely trusted it, similarly customers will continue to manually override system recommendations without that trust.  And manual processes reduce efficiency and accuracy.

Q. What are potential areas that supply chain executives may be overlooking in today’s environment when it comes to supply chain strategy and execution?

A. Focusing on having clean consistent data, data that the users can trust, is vital. Trustworthy data goes beyond frictionless integration. It’s important for executives to evaluate the maturity of their supply chain and the availability of trustworthy data, and then decide which supply chain project is right for their companies. Should you use technology to design supply chain 4.0, or are you ready for supply chain 5.0?

Supply chains are complex systems similar to biological organisms, with hundreds of variables and interactions between variables. It is not possible to make smart decisions manually given the large number of variables.  For example, offshore sourcing can reduce cost but will increase lead time, which can increase working capital costs and reduce supply chain agility resulting in lower revenues. Similarly, this applies when comparing two suppliers with different lead times and costs. The technology is now available to automate the impact of all the different variables on a targeted metric.  Technology is also available to automate the routing of day-to-day tasks.  The question is are you ready for the technology?

If you are moving from spreadsheets to an enterprise system, it’s probably best to first focus on making sure that you are able to take advantage of the advanced science and decision support that these systems have to offer, along with the ability to maintain and manage data.  If you already have a good supply chain planning system deployed, you should be thinking of implementing a system that provides more supply chain visibility and collaboration such as supply chain control tower.  If you have the planning, visibility, and collaboration sorted, you should be focused on automation and prescriptive analytics.

Q. What is ketteQ doing to meet today’s supply chain demands?

A. ketteQ has thoughtfully designed its platform and solutions to help companies achieve their objectives regardless of where they are in their supply chain improvement journey.

ketteQ’s supply chain platform is designed to make supply chains efficient, agile, and resilient.  Depending on where a company may be in its supply chain maturity, it may have different priorities.  But, as a supply chain software provider, we want to make sure that we can help our clients regardless of their current level of maturity.  Our platform is built on five fundamental pillars which are necessary to achieve the goals of efficiency, agility, and resiliency: Data Integration, Visibility, Orchestration, Predictive Analytics/Decision Support, and Automation.

ketteQ is dedicated to building a new paradigm for Supply Chain planning and operations.  Built by experts in supply chain operations, finance, sales, and marketing, no one understands the business challenges better.  Built on Salesforce with strengths in security, scalability, and configurability, ketteQ offers supply chain organizations extended capabilities to fill in the gaps left by legacy systems.  

Q. Bonus question – What is your favorite Spotify playlist?

A. I have created my own personal Spotify lists that capture different phases of my life and I use them to time travel.   My longest playlist is currently 24 hours and 35 minutes.

Ready to design a supply chain system that will transform your business in 2022! Reach out to us here at ketteQ today.

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