For the eighth consecutive year, SCDigest has partnered with the researchers at Gartner to take a deep look at supply chain practice and technology, surveying SCDigest readers to form the basis for what has become one of the industry's most important and influential research projects.

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"We see that companies have and continue to invest heavily in SCM technologies, but we want to dig deeper into whether these investments are providing the anticipated value expected," Klappich noted. What Do You Say? Click Here to Send Us Your Comments Click Here to See Reader Feedback

"There were several importent observations from last year’s study," said Gartner vice president Dwight Klappich, who is leading the research effort again along with Chad Eschinger. "First, as we dug deeper into supply chain maturity and then looked at respondents answers to certain questions, we came away with the belief that many organizations talk a good game and say they view SCM as strategic, but that their actions suggest that they really remain largely operational in their day to day activities."

Klappich says the study found, for example, that there was a renewed emphasis on cost reduction and process efficiency and less emphasis on more forward-looking opportunities such as customer service, using supply chain to grow the business, or developing process innovation, all of which dropped in importance from previous years.

"What was interesting was that while cost reduction was high on the priority list, cost pressure was not seen as a notable obstacle or challenge keeping SCM organizations from meeting their goals and objectives," Klappich added.

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A second observation from the 2013 study is that complexity, variability and lack of visibility remain major barriers to success despite all the investments SCM organizations have made in technologies to target these issues, Klappich noted.

"A key question becomes: Is this because the systems are inadequate? When we looked at utilization of key applications we found that for a lot of software companies significantly underutilize the technologies they already own," Klappich observed. "The data showed that across applications from WMS to TMS to supply chain planning and more, over 50% of companies by category said they only partially utilize the applications they own. This presents a real opportunity."

For the 2015 study, Klappich said, "We will continue to look at year over year changes in areas like supply chain priorities and obstacles, but will also focus more on digging into the how SCM maturity influences later decision-making."

He noted that last year's study was the first to delve deeper into evaluating SCM maturity in this way, and that the research highlighted that there are distinct differences in decision-making based around various levels of maturity - a relationship that has not been well studied to date.

The research will also look at the software utilization issue in even more detail.

"We see that companies have and continue to invest heavily in SCM technologies, but we want to dig deeper into whether these investments are providing the anticipated value expected and to see how utilization and maturity affects these results," Klappich noted.

(Supply Chain Trends and Issues Article - Continued Below)