Global Supply Chain Transformation - BCI's VP Dinner in Switzerland April 2015

On the evening of April 15th 2015 a group of high level supply chain officers from different industries joined BCI’s Annual VP Supply Chain Dinner in Switzerland. This time the even was held in Montreux, on the sunny shores of Lake Geneva. Participating companies included e.g. Edwards Lifesciences, Monsanto, Ariad Pharmaceuticals, Celgene, Boehringer Ingelheim, Novo Nordisk, Bombardier, and others.

The topic of the evening was global supply chain transformation. Johan Beukema, Partner Supply Chain at BCI, presented a number of key developments that BCI is expecting to increase in the coming years. Topics that were covered are e.g.:

• Supply chain management being globalized with HQ taking end to end control
• The emergence of truly global supply chain networks
• Visibility to become even more key, e.g. enabled by new technologies and control tower concepts
• Supply chain segmentation, in order to balance better the needs for cost reduction and higher service
• Inventory management to be made a much more strategic topic, e.g. through implementing “real S&OP”

During dinner lively discussions were held around the table, fueled by the statement that also in supply chain status quo is not good enough anymore. Drawing parallels with Uber, Alibaba, Amazon, etc. it was discussed how in each of the represented industries such a development would impact the supply chain.