Cisco’s warehouse of the future

This is an excerpt of the original article. It was written for the July/August 2015 edition of Supply Chain Management Review. The full article is available to current subscribers.

July/August 2015

When it comes to career development, supply chain managers have to execute a bit of jiu jitsu. They’re charged with nding and developing the next generation of talent while simultaneously advancing their own careers in a eld that is often overlooked by senior management. The biggest challenge of all is getting their agenda in front of the Board at a time when supply chain operations are more critical than ever to an organization’s success, but still largely invisible compared to sales, marketing, and product development. Remember: It’s your career—and your supply chain. We hope this month’s issue will help you make the most of both.

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At ProMat this year, I spoke to a major retailer who made a provocative statement: Forget all the cool automation on the show floor. He viewed that as a commodity. What he wanted was intelligent software that could give him more real-time information about more aspects of his operations than he was getting now. “I think suppliers need to stop thinking of themselves as hardware shops and start thinking of themselves as software shops,” he said.

That sentiment strikes a chord with Jack Allen, senior director of logistics and manufacturing solutions for Cisco. “I walk through a lot of warehouses where people are enamored with the mechanical technology,” Allen says. “But, in our view, it’s not about mechanical automation: It’s about software.”

As one of the companies that provide the hardware, software and systems that connect to the Internet, it should come as no surprise that Cisco is focused on the Internet of Everything, or IoE. This is the idea that all of the machines, equipment, gadgets, appliances and things we use in business and our daily lives will be connected to the Internet. IoE is more than just connecting things, it’s about connecting things, people, processes and data in a way that’s usable and useful.

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