The vast majority of the supply chain environment is uncaptured by supply chain decision makers’ current digital models, according to Gartner, Inc.
“The ‘digital-to-reality gap’ will continue to hamper supply chain performance objectives unless technology investments are complemented by enabling decision support for local, cross-functional decision makers, who have better visibility into the hidden and often undigitized elements of the supply chain,” says Suzie Petrusic, senior director analyst in Gartner’s Supply Chain Practice.
Key takeaways:
- Gartner’s research found that current use of digital models to analyze trade-offs made no meaningful impact on the rate of good decision outcomes.
- The research defined a “good” decision as one that led to and met the decision maker’s expected supply chain performance and cost outcomes with low decision maker regret.
- By augmenting human visibility through digital trade-off analysis technology, these local decision makers are 83% more likely to make a good decision than a bad one.
“More than half of supply chain leaders reliant on digital technology to make a recent strategic decision (e.g., S&OP decisions, network design decisions, or disruption response decisions) told us that they felt they would have landed on better decision outcomes without the use of their models, and our analysis suggests that they are correct,” says Petrusic. “The fault is not just with technology itself, but rather with the incomplete picture of the supply chain that these digital tools capture. Up to 80% of the actual, on-the-ground processes that these technology investments are meant to be ‘optimizing’ are not even reflected in current digital models.”
