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Showing posts from April, 2012

The importance to innovate as a supplier

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I spoke recently with a senior executive of a small external service provider. A service provider with a staff of 350+ in the year 2000 and some 75 today. So one of the main topics we discussed was how this happened. The founders of the company identified some twenty years ago a software niche in supply chain management. In this period manufacturers and their up-and downstream partners in the supply chain were looking for solutions to exchange information to optimize their logistics processes and stock levels. The founders came up with some very clever concepts and for many years the sky was the limit. What the founders and subsequent managers overlooked however is that every (software) product goes through a lifecycle. And at the end of the lifecycle the software product has become obsolete. It may become obsolete because of not anticipating on evolving functionalities, technologies (e.g. Cobol) or because business models. Functionalities. In the past many software vendor