IBM Launches Supply Chain Innovation Center

Jeff Berman, Senior Editor, Logistics Management -- Supply Chain Management Review, 3/18/2008 10:03:00 AM

BEIJING—Technology giant IBM recently announced it has opened its first supply chain innovation center, which will based in Beijing, China. The company said the center will be focused on helping companies throughout the world integrate and transform their global supply chain capabilities.

IBM also noted that the center will leverage the company’s expertise in supply chain research, business consulting services, software capabilities, and its own Integrated Supply Chain background. The center will be available to IBM’s worldwide client base across all industries.

Sanjeev Nagrath, Global Supply Chain Management Leader for IBM Global Business Services, told LM in an interview that the planning and launch phase for the center spanned nine months. He also said that Beijing was selected as the site for the center, so IBM could best leverage its team of supply chain researchers in its China-based research labs and to also address the supply chain needs of both local Chinese customers and multi-national companies for whom China is a key link in their global supply chain.

IBM said that some of the center’s offerings include:

• Virtual Command Center, a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) based supply chain visibility offering that integrates and synchronizes supply, demand, and logistics information and enables companies to gain visibility into the status and performance of the supply chain to facilitate effective decision-making in a sense and respond environment;
• Supply Chain Optimization tools and modelers that allow companies to design and operate agile and adaptable supply chain processes and networks; and
• a Carbon Tradeoff Modeler that assists companies include carbon output-footprinting as a key variable when optimizing the supply chain and helping them to understand the outcome of critical tradeoffs.

In terms of how the center will help customers leverage best practices for things like supply chain methods and techniques, Nagrath said that at the center IBM will train its clients in emerging markets to help them come up the supply chain maturity curve.

“The key advantage of using this center is Speed to Benefit,” said Nagrath. “[Shippers] will be able to leverage existing solutions and tailor them to their needs and for their most complex problems be able to tap into our research and development capabilities to come up with first-of-a kind solutions. Additionally, the center will be a gateway for our clients to tap into our 7,500+ customer worldwide Supply Chain practice.”

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