Eleven years have passed since I first wrote about supply chain management software in the pages of Managing Automation. In the spring of 1998, the notion of building and managing an extended supply chain using enterprise software was just becoming known to a newly globalizing world.
My take on the problems of using software to manage an extended supply chain turned out to be a little more prescient than I had expected, especially because the opportunity to use social networking software to overcome the limits of SCM software wasn't even a glimmer in my eye, or anyone else's, at the time.
I summed up my main beef in 1998 this way: "How does the supply chain owner, or owners, manage the community of decision makers?"
It was obvious that the software magic being applied to managing supply chains ignored this community of decision makers — the human aspect of the supply chain — in favor of highly automated processes that took as much human intervention out of the supply chain process as possible. "The problem with supply chain software is that consensus, agreement, and mutual benefit are not part of the built-in functionality of the software," I wrote.