Congratulations to the Cisco Supply Chain Operations (CSCO) team. For seven consecutive years, Cisco has placed in the Top 10 of Gartner's prestigious ranking!

Led by Cisco Senior VPJohn Kern, the supply chain operations team here at Cisco has undergone an extensive transformation and continues to be recognized globally as a best-in-class practitioner. With more than a thousand contract manufacturing and component suppliers, logistics (3PL) and other service partners, along with more than 25,000 orderable product IDs-which are broadly mixed amongst build cycles of engineer-to-order, configure-to-order, build-to-order and build-to-stock-the complexity and global scale of what our Cisco-resident supply chain gurus deal with on a daily basis could be staggering for some organizations but is managed with excellence by CSCO. Beyond the outstanding development and fulfillment supply chain and manufacturing management services rendered, CSCO has served as a tremendous expert asset and executive connection for our go-to-market expansion with manufacturing customers' lines of business, particularly related to the Internet of Everything (IoE) market transition.

The splashy ad below illustrating a vision for the Internet of Things (IoT) has become much more of a reality and the technologies and products shown are in use within Cisco's supply chain ecosystem today.

Recently, two Cisco colleagues - Edna Conway, VP CSCO and Chief Security Officer and Bob Dean, Director, Manufacturing and Energy Vertical, co-authored an excellent article forManufacturing Leadership Journalentitled 'The Fourth Dimension of Supply Chains'. The article highlights how new technologies are empowering supply chains as never before, and how they are also exposing enterprises and ecosystems to new risks.  Cisco's comprehensive approach to mitigate risks and bolster confidence across the supply chain focuses on the four areas of malicious modification/substitution of technology, counterfeit products (both raw materials and finished goods), the security component of supply chain resiliency and misuse of intellectual property.

Discipline surrounding that fourth topic of securing intellectual property has become an even greater concern in the face of new business models and innovations with the application of IoE in manufacturing. Best-in-class manufacturers are, like Cisco, increasingly leveraging their supply chains and ecosystems to develop offering portfolios balanced between sustaining and disruptive innovations that are derived from scrutinized customer segmentation and guided by such principles as value-driven design discipline, cross-BU portfolio platform awareness and rationalization, differentiated solution-service bundling, and connected system-level lifecycle services (e.g., Product as a Service). All of these design and innovation processes require immersive and intimate collaboration with customers and across supply chains.

Cisco's relevance to enable manufacturing supply chain and innovation strategies to achieve more transformative business outcomes has never been greater:

• Virtualized and distributed compute with Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) and Supply Chain Collaboration accelerating time-to-market with value-oriented product and service offering innovation;
• IoE-enabled '3D Value Chains' with ubiquitous visibility accelerating portfolio rationalization decisions, improving throughput and enabling more sustainable supply chains;
• Business video with IoE-enabled connectivity accelerating lifecycle service offerings throughout the supply chain, like remote access, monitoring and diagnostics with mobile expert/advisor.

What are some of the challenges, innovations and opportunities in your global supply chain today?  Join the conversation below and let me know.  Thanks for reading.