“What customers want is what Amazon has”

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    Business Spotlight 6/2018
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    Transkript: “What customers want is what Amazon has”

    Perry: Is there any one company that’s seen as the world leader in supply-chain management?

    Fitzgerald: There is, and that company, its name begins with the first letter of the alphabet — it’s Amazon. And Amazon is the world champion in supply-chain management. It’s the be the benchmarkMaßstäbe setzenbenchmark. Why is that? Well, from the very beginning, Amazon saw itself in the business of supplying customers with products. So if you look at their strategy of where they placed their warehouseLagerwarehouses, they placed them near cities, in fact near city centres. Amazon invested very early in automation, and the humans who to pick sth.hier: etw. (heraus)nehmenpicked and packed the products, today, well, the picking is increasingly done by robots, and the packing is done by humans. Amazon is a specialist in cloud computing services. So it has the software, it has the engineerIngenieur(in), Techniker(in)engineers that can create the kind of structures that optimize its supply chain. It simply is the best. But, of course, Amazon is very secretiveverschwiegen, geheimnistuerischsecretive. So we don’t know exactly what that magic saucehier: Geheimrezeptmagic sauce is that they use to make themselves the world champions.

    Perry: The global players have the money and the programmers to create specialized systems for running their supply chains, but where can medium-sizemittelgroß; hier: mittelständischmedium-size companies get SCM software?

    Fitzgerald: According to the research company Gartner, the market for supply-chain management software by 2021 will be worth $19 billion. It’s a huge market. The leader is SAP. Many companies use SAP software already for managing their finances, their payrollGehaltsliste, -abrechnungpayroll. And, of course, SAP has various modules, not just one supply-chain management module, but it has various models that cover all aspects of supply-chain management. And these are all used together to create the kind of structure to help companies manage the process from acquiring materials to delivering the end product to the customer. Other players are Oracle, IBM - in fact there are many, many, many in this area. But they’re all under pressure now — and this is really interesting — because what customers want is what Amazon has. Customers want real-time information on what’s happening in their supply chain. So they want SAP and the others to provide the missing magic sauce, but it’s not that easy.


     

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