Bringing the World’s Supply Chain Data into the Palm of Your Hand

Transport, Exposure, and Perspective

Elementum formally announced its market launch (although it ‘soft launched’ a few months ago in terms of its website).

It is an 18-month-old supply chain start-up that was funded and incubated at $24B contract manufacturer Flextronics, but has now taken on $44M in Series B funding from Lightspeed Venture Partners.

It is located in Mountain View, has over 50 people working for it, and has 'released’ three of its mobile products called Transport, Exposure, and Perspective.

I only caveat the word ‘released’ because basically the only customer really using the product is Flextronics (also the dominant primary investor), but over a dozen of Flextronics’ roughly 1,000 customers have been kicking the tires on the products (more on this later), and at least two, Dyson and Enphase Energy, have signed on.

Basically, the above products are mobile-based visibility products. Transport offers visibility into existing shipments and offers predictive and rules-based alerts to notify managers of any potential delays. Exposure is a supply chain risk management product that is most similar to Resilinc.

It monitors various external content sources and then based on an adverse event at a certain location, a perimeter is established, impact analyses run to determine affected locations, suppliers (and eventually suppliers’ suppliers), components, and products (with associated revenues/margins), and appropriate personnel notified and hounded until the problems are resolved. Finally, Perspective offers a mobile dashboard with a variety of KPIs regarding supplier delivery performance, working capital, cycle time, and a few others.

Unfortunately, the products understandably are currently ‘tightly coupled’ to the Flextronics supply chain, and until Elementum releases its “SDK” (solution/software development kit) for customers to hook up their own supply chain data (a somewhat non-trivial exercise), the dashboards will basically be tuned by Elementum to only display the Flextronics portion of the supply chain relevant to Flextronics customers who’d purchase these mobile applications.

The solutions have also been designed to run across multiple mobile platforms (Android, iOS, etc.), but will clearly require PC browser interfaces for power users who want to work on larger data sets of tabular data and other UI features poorly suited to small touch devices.

The applications are almost toy-like in their simplicity, and not always in a good way, but, although the products may lack some functional depth in the short term, there is a hell of a lot of thoughtful design and impressive technology under the hood with regards to its massively scalable and secure platform built on an open and service-oriented architecture.

Just read the product sheets (Transport, Exposure, Perspective) and the technical job postings out to get an idea of what I’m talking about.

Eventually, the products will transition from just cool smartphone/tablet-based supply chain event management applications that Flextronics customers can show off on the golf course to more hardened response management and collaborative applications that any supply chain participant could use.

The CEO of Elementum, a confident former McKinsey consultant named Nader Mikhail, is looking to “build the next $10B cloud computing company.” More accurately, Mike McNamara, the CEO of Flextronics, is looking for Nader to help him “pivot from a global manufacturer to a global supply chain solutions company. I expect great things in the coming years as he [Nader] revolutionizes the supply chain world through his leadership of Elementum.”

In the ‘case study’ video on Elementum’s website (above), Mike holds up a smartphone and declares “On Elementum, I run my supply chain on this!” He also touts the “Elementum layer on top of Flextronics scale” and says that “If your supply chain is not real-time, mobile, and connected, I don’t know how you’ll run your supply chain in five years.”

Yes, I know, cue the major eye roll here. A lot of bravado for sure. But, it’s not necessarily a bad thing. The supply chain market (and even just the direct procurement aspect of it) does not have a strong cloud-based platform (not just an application suite) with depth, breadth, and technical. There are players with different piece parts, but it is still very early days in the market, and there is clearly a need for strong leadership.

Related: SC24/7 ‘Papers’ on Cloud Platforms

But, should a brick-and-mortar supply chain participant really want to get into the software business? Is it core? Isn’t the market littered with such failed forays? What about the conflicts of interest and channel conflict with existing partners? Does the company have the stomach for the long battle ahead? These are important questions, and there is a back story to this tale that makes it relevant to all practitioners (and providers) in the market beyond this ‘new’ provider.

Source: Elementum: A Disruptive Force is Coming to the Supply Chain Cloud… Maybe (Part 1)

From Bob Ferrari: Elementum Launches in the Supply Chain Cloud

Elementum, which describes itself as the first mobile platform for end-to-end supply chain management, formally announced its market launch after 18 months in stealth mode as well as securing $44 million in Series B funding from Lightspeed Ventures.

The actual genesis of this B2B network comes from global contract manufacturer Flextronics, also an investor as well as a primary user. Flextronics has been utilizing the Elementum platform to plan and coordinate aspects of its own global supply chain and is now extending both the platform and the established network connections to other potential customers, including consumer products producer Dyson, also noted as a current customer.

The company’s marketing tagline is: Supply chain made simple, which is perhaps a bit too simplistic in a message. It is great for marketing purposes but many of our readers are acutely aware that managing today’s global supply chains is not at all simple.

Supply Chain Matters was briefed on the cloud-based platform and technology stack incorporated within Elementum in early December. The rather interesting aspect is the network’s data management, end-user experience, and security model. It is described as rather similar to Facebook and Linked-In and indeed that is what we observed. continued…

Bob Ferrari