Becoming more global and complex. As an executive, you face ever-increasing challenges in managing supply and demand as customer needs continually shift. These challenges span the entire supply or value chain process. In the planning stage, fragmented information hinders synchronization of supply and demand. Ever-shifting global sourcing patterns make it difficult to find low-cost goods. Your company may be forced to build inventory at every stage of the supply chain process, due to poor or nonexistent integration with suppliers and contract manufacturers. And there's a lack of global visibility into products in transit and in the pipeline, which interferes with the ability to meet customer service levels. Finally, there's no ability to effectively up-sell, cross-sell across business units and actually condition market demand. To address these challenges, some companies are shifting toward sense-and- respond supply chain strategies. Sense-and-respond supply chains can monitor, manage and optimize business exceptions - anomalous events that occur within supply chains - with a limited need for human intervention. They can provide event assessment and optimize supply chain performance between planning and execution, based on real-time information. Ultimately, they allow businesses to remain nimble and responsive to shifting demand. And in a proactive business environment, sense-and-respond supply chains can be used to influence market demand.
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