Articles

The supply chain ecosystem plays a very important role in the success or failure of organizations, markets, and economies. Supply chain ecosystems are broadly defined as supply chain organizations and their collaborators. Today's combined challenges of pandemic shutdowns, rising internet usage, and skyrocketing climate change concerns demand that the supply chain ecosystem better connect with customers, when and how they want, to provide products and services with high levels of availability and zero defects, yet collaboratively do this to reduce transportation and production risks, often at the same time reducing operational costs and carbon footprints. Addressing these challenges, this work explores the cloud delivery capabilities of cloud-native architectures to enable the big data integrations and analytics that are needed to grow smarter supply chain ecosystems. This work describes what smart supply chain ecosystems are and how they are planning to grow their technology and integration capabilities. Discussing the industry-leading advanced and manufacturing technology producer ecosystems, it is explained how their technology collaboration and investment plans are driven by climate change and job creation goals. With these background models, the work examines the new digital reality of customer-driven experiences and economies that are demanding cloud-native and intelligent technology partnerships to deliver climate objectives, operational responsiveness, and compatibility to avoid trading economies of scale for economies of integration. The final objectives of this paper are to share key ideas about the need to balance the growing customer service direct-to-consumer business models with those for collaborative investment by market and industry. In doing this, it hopes to promote an intelligent supply chain ecosystem foundation for helping its different participating countries survive and thrive in the digital economy.