Last year I had an interview with Max Henry of China Supply Chain Council and as he described, the state of the supply chain market in China was such that the companies were more interested to stay with basic ERP systems than to move to more sophisticated solutions. The reason was that they had recently got free from the problems of implementation and they didn't want to experience more problems anymore. The situation in the market was also such that didn't require those solutions. But it seems that China is changing...

Noah Dixon, vice president of product management for Catalyst International, a provider of supply chain execution software and warehouse consulting services, told Modern Material Handling: 'One of the things we've noticed over the last three or four months is that we get more hits at 1 a.m. on our Web site than at any other time of day. And what we've discovered is that it's traffic from China.' Noah Dixon thinks that Asian visitors are hungry for information about supply chain management. He said, 'They're looking at all the content we offer, and they'll spend 15 minutes a visit on the site.'

The visitors aren't from multi-national companies doing business in China. They are from locally owned companies apparently looking for information on improving their operations. That creates an opportunity for smaller software companies with under $100 million in revenue, like Catalyst, which is Noah Dixon's company.

In my point of view, increase in the number of hits from a specific country shouldn't be the base to make the conclusion that Chinese people are moving toward SCE implementation because the state of information systems adoption is rather inflexible, but it certainly shows that it has become one of the issues they are thinking about. This will certainly be an opportunity for SCE companies in 5-7 years, but before that is a bit far from reality.