Internet and data trends

- Now let's look at five important information technology capabilities that are supercharging supply chains. The internet of things, customer profiling, big data, cloud computing, and analytics. When the internet was created, it was just a way for computers to talk with one another. But these days, we've managed to turn all sorts of things into computers, and we've connected them to the internet. For example, in the old days a watch was a mechanical device. Today, most watches are computers, and many of them can send data over the internet. In other words, watches are now internet of things devices, or IoT for short. This same trend is occurring throughout the supply chain, where common equipment like conveyors, pallet, and semi-trailers are being outfitted with devices that connect them to the internet. Connecting these things to the internet gives us more control over what's happening in our supply chain. At the same time we can capture information about things, we're also able to learn a lot about our customers. We do this by using the internet to collect data about their behavior, and we can use this data to build a customer profile or persona. This can be a controversial topic because people sometimes feel that collecting data is an invasion of privacy, but the fact remains that many companies are able to collect data about their customers and prospective customers, simply by tracking their online behavior. Which brings us to the issue of big data. While collecting tons of data about your supply chain and your customers can be useful, the sheer volume of data involved can create a challenge. The amount of data that we're capturing is so large that it can overwhelm traditional databases, and much of the data is unstructured. Things like conversations, photographs, and videos, which makes it more difficult for computers to manage. Rather than storing that data on a computer located on your own premises, it's often better to use servers that you access remotely over the internet. This is called cloud computing or cloud storage. A cloud-based approach makes it easier to scale your storage and your processing up or down, because you're basically just renting space. It also makes it easy to access that data from any computer or any device that's connected to the internet. One of the ways to create value from supply chain data is through analytics. Analytics involves using your data to gain insights about what's happening in your supply chain. Of course, in order to benefit from supply chain analytics, you also need to have ways to respond to the insights that you find. The internet is having a profound impact on supply chains. The Internet of things and the growth of consumer data are leading to issues with big data for supply chains. This data often needs to be managed using cloud computing, and we can use analytics to gain insights about our business and find new ways to create value for our company, for our customers, and for the entire supply chain.