Lora Cecere

Leading Analyst on Manufacturing and Marketing in a Social World

BIG IDEAS

• Rise of Social Commerce
  What started as an interactive marketing phenomena is today redefining commerce. As social technologies extend horizontally to redefine customer service, new product launch, and go-to-market strategies, companies are creating new user experiences to improve brand advocacy, grow trial, and drive commerce. In this presentation, Lora shows audiences how social technologies will evolve and impact businesses in the next five years and help organizations understand how to gain insights on social strategy development.
• Bricks Matter
  Outsource? In source? In region? Global sourcing? In today’s global economy, asset strategies matter more than ever. This presentation will help organizations to understand current trends and how companies are defining winning asset strategies.
• Winning with Demand-driven Value Networks
  The most effective response is demand-driven; but how do companies make the journey from a supply-centric to a demand-driven response? What is required, what are the stumbling blocks and what are the benefits?
• How to put more Value in your Value Network
  The demands are increasing. Join this session to gain insights on how companies make trade-offs between sustainability, corporate social responsibility, tax efficiency, growth, responsiveness, efficiency and customer service? Gain insights on the redesign of value networks to maximize value and make the right trade-offs.
• Putting the T in Your Organization
  Over the last 25 years, supply chain organizations have been propelled by a strong focus on vertical excellence. In today’s world, vertical excellence sub-optimizes value in the supply chain. Companies that have reversed the equation building strong horizontal processes–revenue management, supplier development, new product launch, and Sales and Operations Planning–have 15% lower supply chain costs and better balance between working capital, return on assets and cost of goods sold. However, to achieve this goal, companies need to invest in talent development to build managers with “T competencies” and invest in applications to build seamless end-to-end horizontal processes. Lora will present findings from the current research on her book Bricks Matter that will inform and help shape your organization's next generation processes.

SNAPSHOT BIO

Lora Cecere is an enterprise strategist focused on the changing face of enterprise technologies. A Partner with Altimeter Group and the author of enterprise software blog “Supply Chain Shaman,”  Lora's research is designed for the early adopter seeking first mover advantage. Known for her hard-hitting, often contrarian views, Lora is considered a supply chain visionary.  Her current research topics include the digital consumer, supply chain sensing, demand shaping and revenue management, demand-driven value networks, accelerating innovation through open design networks, the evolution of predictive analytics, and emerging business intelligence solutions.

Lora brings several years of industry analyst expertise coupled with two decades of manufacturing, marketing, and software expertise. Her analyst experiences include roles at Gartner Group and most recently at AMR Research. Before serving as an industry analyst, Lora was a line-of-business user/buyer and a builder of enterprise solutions. At Manugistics, she served in a number of consulting, sales and marketing roles with a final position of Vice President of Sales Operations. Lora also served a Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) for Descartes Systems Group where she helped in positioning the company as an early on-demand solution for logistics. Prior to that, Lora worked for 17 years in a variety of roles including manufacturing operations, distribution planning, and research & development for Proctor & Gamble, Kraft/General Foods, and Clorox.

Publications such as The Wall Street Journal, BusinessWeek, Fortune, Inc., Forbes, Information Week, ComputerWorld, Financial Times, Supply Management Review and Consumer Goods Technology frequently seek Lora’s point of view.

Lora graduated from the University of Tennessee B.S. in chemical engineering and earned a MBA from the Wharton School of Business. She has also completed post graduate work in organizational development from Georgetown University. Lora is APICS CIRM and CPIM certified and is a past teacher of effective marketing concepts for software executives in the Pragmatic Marketing program.