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Controlling Fragmentation and Change
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From a business perspective, a closer look at the possibilities and impact of service-oriented architectures can benefit not only IT specialists, but also supply chain practitioners. Increased supply chain fragmentation is the central element of the upcoming trends that they will have to face. With rising consumer influence and global competition, companies are driven to introduce better and cheaper products more frequently. What’s more, products are becoming more complex as customers demand sophisticated features, new services, and a greater number of choices. The increased rate of change is shrinking product life cycles and forcing supply chains to become more dynamic and diversified. The supplier base grows to address the complexity and the time-to-market pressure involved.
As a result, companies are creating new or reconfiguring existing supply chain networks to connect with consumers in the global marketplace. To contain costs in such a dynamic business environment, companies outsource many supply chain processes so that they can focus their limited IT resources on their core competencies. However, these actions can cause IT costs to increase in the long term, because a supply chain that is fragmented across multiple enterprises also tends to create non-standard or differentiated processes.
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Read entire article on SAP Info
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Posted: Thursday, October 04, 2007
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