Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2022. Read them in this 14th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
Product Availability, Customer Experience, Agile Integration Methods & More
By Tushar Patel, CMO of Cleo
If 2020 was the year that the general public took notice of supply chain operations and challenges, whether as a result of toilet paper shortages or unavailable holiday gifts, 2021 was the year that supply chain-oriented organizations took notice of the multitude of technology solutions that can prevent supply chain catastrophes.
Throughout 2021, we’ve seen manufacturing, logistics, wholesale and retail companies embrace technology as an enabler of business continuity and success. Nearly all organizations (96%) state that COVID changed their business strategy for 2021, and were looking to accelerate cloud migrations, focus on digital transformation, and enable digital commerce to mitigate the effects of the pandemic.
So, what types of changes can we expect for the supply chain industry and enterprise technology solutions in 2022? Below are some predictions from industry experts that address the availability of products, customer experience trends, embracing agility through integration, and more.
Black market goods won’t be here for the holidays
We’ve all noticed the missing products on store shelves, delayed deliveries to our doorstep, unavailable high-tech components like microchips and processors impeding companies’ ability to produce consumer goods like computers, smartphones and cars. But those are all legitimately traded, legal goods. How will the supply chain issues we’ve been grappling with over the past year and a half impact the black market?
When it comes to faux fashion goods, like bootlegged purses, jackets, bags and belts, you may be surprised to learn that knock-off brands often use the same manufacturers as their imitated legitimate brands. As a result, many of the black-market knock-off products we often see around the holidays and in downtown markets will be just as unavailable as the designer counterparts.
When it comes to the drug market, synthetic drugs such as fentanyl are typically manufactured outside of the United States. These drugs travel through the same supply chains, albeit with a few cut corners, as legitimate goods produced overseas. If there’s a port backup or a supply chain upset in a drug-manufacturing country, you can expect the availability of drugs like fentanyl and other substances used to dilute illegal chemicals to be delayed.
What impact with this ultimately have on manufacturers, consumers, and the people in charge of catching illegal goods smugglers? Ultimately, we may be in for a holiday season without bootlegged purses and clothes, and hopefully with fewer drug-related overdoses. Only time will tell, but now is the time for manufacturers of legitimate goods to ramp back up on their manufacturing so they can beat the imitation products back to market. – Frank Kenney, Director of Market Strategy, Cleo
Customer training will be available on demand thanks to cloud adoption
Due to the increased rate of digital transformation and technology adoption, spurred by the pandemic, most enterprises have at least one – if not multiple – new technologies they’re working with in their day-to-day duties. As a result, more employees must be trained to use new technologies they haven’t previously encountered. I’m seeing more and more customers begin to request on-demand training, rather than waiting for the next in-person or virtual group training to educate their employees. In fact, low-code and no-code solutions have strengthened the case for on demand self-paced training even further. Today’s remote workforce will not entertain traditional in-person, instructor based training.
To meet this demand, technology vendors must make their trainings remotely available on-demand. However, they likely won’t want their trainings to be available to just anyone – so simply hosting training videos on the company website won’t be a great solution. Instead, as a standard, technology vendors will host their customer training sessions in the cloud for urgent training needs, and will also offer virtual on-demand trainings for customers that have a lot of questions or need customized support. – Vipin Mittal, VP, Customer Experience, Cleo
Standard Solution/Platform based Service level agreements (SLAs) will be replaced by Business SLA
When it comes to the manufacturing, logistics and wholesale industries, events during the pandemic have shown us that a single day’s delay – or even a few hours in some cases – can cascade into complex supply chain bottlenecks that delay the transportation of goods for weeks or months at a time. As a result, supply chain-oriented companies know they need to remedy any issues caused by technology solutions as quickly as possible. As more enterprises engage additional vendors for technology solutions in 2022 and beyond, they will be demanding much stricter SLAs than are standard historically. Further, our customers will hold all their vendors to a holistic business level SLAs over individual platform specific SLA. Their offering to eventual end customer would be as weak as the weakest provider. I estimate that the standard SLA in B2B world will shrink to thirty minutes or less in 2022, especially for critical business transactions.
Meeting a thirty-minute SLA is a very challenging task – especially for vendors who have hundreds of customers. To meet this shortened SLA demand, we’re going to see more supply chain technology vendors offering completely self-serviceable products that do not require external support at a moment’s notice. Otherwise, vendors will need to significantly increase their hiring to meet such short SLA demands. – Vipin Mittal, VP, Customer Experience, Cleo
Cloud-enablement becomes standard for manufacturing, logistics, and retail companies, save for one exception: customized legacy systems
At the start of the pandemic, we were surprised how quickly businesses started to look to the future and engineer their business processes for what it might bring. This has not subsided in 2021, and in fact we’ve seen the acceleration of digital transformation to support new business models and the agility needed to respond to the rapidly evolving business market. A surprising number of companies across all of the players in supply chain are taking this as an opportunity to re-engineer their IT landscapes and prepare for the next supply chain upset and the next era of digital transformation.
This trend will continue through 2022 with those who have been holding off on digital transformation realizing that it is going to be essential to survival. Part of the transformation has involved a lot more organizations moving infrastructure to the Cloud. Some organizations have historically resisted this because they have critical on-premise business systems which either have no cloud equivalent, or would be too costly and/or time consuming to move in the short term. In 2022, we’ll see more of these organizations adopting a hybrid strategy, moving everything but critical on-premise systems to the cloud to leverage the agility and flexibility cloud service can bring while maintaining core legacy on-premise systems. – Dave Brunswick, VP, Solutions, Cleo
Supply chain-oriented enterprises will embrace agile integration methods or die
2021 has shown us that when the supply-chain is under pressure, it cracks, and things break down in unexpected ways. Business must be agile to react to those breakdowns, which means having the processes and technology in place to adapt quickly when the next unexpected disruption or shift happens. That means being able to rapidly engage and integrate with new trading partners, suppliers and sales channels, and optimize existing processes. “The only constant is change” has never been more true.
I’ve seen continuing demand for multi-enterprise integration and multi-application integration as businesses re-engineer to be more agile to allow easy adoption of new sales channels, logistics partners and trading relationships. In 2022, we will see the vast majority of supply chain companies moving towards pre-built integration templates (we call them Accelerators), which massively speed up the onboarding process for new trading partners and integrations by instantly connecting new partners and systems through pre-built, out-of-the-box tools. Accelerators will be a core part of enabling the agility of supply-chain organizations this holiday season, as well as into 2022 and beyond. – Dave Brunswick, VP, Solutions, Cleo
Cloud and hybrid cloud adoption will accelerate even more post-pandemic
In a post-pandemic world, enterprises are more aware of the dire need for organizations to digitalize to increase velocity and agility. While migration to the cloud has been happening at a rapid rate, the pandemic has forced most companies – even late adopters – to recognize the value of moving applications and data to the cloud. In 2022, we will see a growing number of hybrid cloud environments with the adoption of technologies like Kubernetes that allow rapid access to data, information and business processes. There is also now a heightened awareness of security risks in on-premise environments that will further propel the need to move to the cloud. – Mahesh Rajasekharan, CEO of Cleo
Supply chain integration will become the nucleus of supply chain management
The lack of agility and responsiveness in global supply chains as highlighted by the pandemic will make CEOs and boards focus more on the importance of resilient, highly integrated supply chain processes and technology. Businesses will start focusing on integrating their ecosystems so that their demand chain and supply chain are highly streamlined with core integration technology so that they can intelligently sense and dynamically responds to market disruptions. – Mahesh Rajasekharan, CEO of Cleo
Automation and no-code will become viewed as foundational to digital transformation
One of the key learnings from the COVID-19 lockdowns is recognizing how manual business processes there still are at many companies and seeing how that hindered their business during the pandemic. Those that had invested in automation, like Amazon, quickly expanded their revenues and profitability despite the shutdowns. Hence in 2022, we will see a tremendous focus on companies automating their core business processes. In order to achieve a new level of automation, firms will embrace low code technologies to allow them to automate anything and everything to eliminate risks and gaps in their core revenue-producing processes. – Mahesh Rajasekharan, CEO of Cleo
Visibility and transparency will become C-level priorities for the enterprise
In today’s digital-driven world, visibility and transparency have become extremely critical to managing customer relationships. Companies that can provide exceptional visibility to their customers regarding product availability, the status of purchase orders, transportation status, proof of delivery, etc., will have a competitive advantage over those that can’t meet increasingly high customer expectations. In 2022, this pressure will require companies to make foundational investments in the cloud, modern integration technology with APIs, and real-time analysis in order to achieve comprehensive visibility. From these investments in visibility and transparency, organizations will be able to build stronger customer and partner relationships. Additionally, they will glean insights from this data that internal operations teams can use to make more intelligent real-time business decisions. – Mahesh Rajasekharan, CEO Cleo
I can’t predict fires, hurricanes, droughts, geopolitical strife, trade wars, labor strikes, or what legislative and regulatory changes are coming. But I can tell you that, based on what industry leaders like these are predicting, for business ecosystems to thrive in 2022 and beyond executives need to be thinking about all the ways they can create more organizational agility to sense and respond most quickly to change.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tushar Patel leads global marketing for Cleo, and holds responsibility for the company’s corporate and customer marketing, demand generation, communications and media, events, and analyst relations initiatives.
Tushar brings more than 20 years of software marketing experience and leadership to the company. Prior to joining Cleo, he was CMO with Kibo Software, and held leadership positions with Innotas Corporation, Mocana Corp. and National Semiconductor. Tushar holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Santa Clara University and an MBA from the HaaS School of Business at the University of California Berkeley.
