The case for supply chain visibility
Mark Carleo has written a nice piece over at Supply & Demand Chain Executive entitled “The case for supply chain visibility.” The article does a nice job of detailing some of the challenges and benefits of increasing suppy chain visibility.
I’ve talked to numerous OEMs and CMs about these issues. Each company struggles with these issues, especially as you get into bigger companies and more globally extended supply chains. OEMs who have outsourced some or all of their manufacturing are, in essence, managing a virtual company today, requiring greater levels of visibility and collaboration by their very nature. Likewise, CMs are managing an increasingly global set of manufacturers and plants as they seek to gain cost and quality advantages.
So, while visibility is very important, its not enough. The one thing I continue to hear from people “in the trenches” is that visibility without the proper tools to actually act on this new found information really doesn’t benefit the organization nearly as much as you might think. Especially in manufacturing operations, where there tend to be hundreds of decisions throughout the day that must be made “now” (responding to a customer on the phone, dealing with a last minute supply disruption, etc.), information alone isn’t enough. The problems are more complex and require collaboration, supply chain analytics, etc.
I was in Palo Alto a few months back and had the opportunity to meet with Dr. Hau Lee at Standford. We talked about this issue under the context of “sense and response” to which he acknowledged that the industry has done a much better job of sensing that providing tools to effectively respond.
So, I agree with Mark’s observations about the need for supply chain visibility, but would just add that effective tools to empower the people needing to make quick decisions are also required.
