Archive for March, 2006

Suppy Chain Digest has an interesting piece feature research with CEOs about their perceptions of supply chain management. You can see the piece here.

What is interesting is that while the majority of CEOs say that from a company perspective their priority is top line growth, they say that from a supply chain management perspective their priority is reducing costs.

Most of our customers focus on achieving improvements in both. They clearly have a mandate to continually drive out costs. But more and more, they are viewing their ability to be extremely responsive to their customers as a key advantage in terms of growing market share and driving top line growth.

It’s interesting that this research indicates that CEOs are not looking to their supply chains to drive growth. Is this the case in your company?

People always ask for more information on customer examples and case studies. APICS Magazine is featuring a case study on Adeptron here.

Here’s a snippet from the article:

“We needed a solution that could not only help us optimize our operations performance and responsiveness, but also offer our customers the level of visibility desired in their extended supply chains,” says Geoff Beale, Adeptron vice president of operations. “We believe our success is dependent upon our ability to build a business that is entirely structured around providing solutions to our partners’ challenges and being responsive to their changing demands.”

The February/March edition of Supply & Demand Chain Executive features its sixth annual Pros to Know issue. According to Supply & Demand Chain Executive, they are “again highlighting those executives working day in and day out to give their companies a competitive edge by transforming their supply chains. This year, our theme was leadership.”

Dave Haskins, Chief Technical Officer at Kinaxis, is featured as an Evangelist.

Congratulations Dave.

Here’s an article over at IndustryWeek referencing research done by IBM (there’s a link to the IBM research in the article). The focus is a survey with CEOs talking about competitiveness.

I think things have evolved to the point that you have to look at innovation in a holistic fashion. While there may be varying sources of innovation (as noted here), to really capitalize on the innovation you have to understand the full impact on the business. For example, what impact does this innovation have on your supply chain and does your supply chain have the ability to capitalize on the innovation. Building in supply chain agility and responsiveness are keys to being able to realizing the full potentional of the innovation.

Patricia Panchak has written an article entitled “Collaboration is key to global success” over at IndustryWeek.

This topic is right on the mark with what we’re seeing. We work with brand owners and contract manufacturers - so a lot of outsourcing. It’s become very clear that while outsourcing provides a lot of benefits, it creates a lot of new challenges as well. And, collaboration, or more importantly, coordination, is critical to ensuring success. Each player in the extended supply network - from brand owner to contract manufacturer to supplier - plays a critical role. And, they have to stay focused on their role. However, everyone’s actions are connected and have an impact on others in the network.

Coordinating activities across an extended supply network is essential to success - for each individual company and for the network as a whole. It starts with multi-enterprise visibility - everyone must be working from a shared view of the truth. Key decision makers throughout the network must have tools to act on this information - tools that help them analyze the impact of their actions and quickly simulate “what-if” scenarios on how best to respond to unexpected changes. And, they need to do this in a collaborative environment.

With the pace of change in today’s market, supply chains are a function of making the right tradeoffs and compromises. These decisions must be made quickly with a clear understanding of their impact - and people need to be involved in a collaborative fashion to coordinate efforts to achieve the desired result.

There’s a new article over at Supply Chain Digest called “How to build a flexible supply chain network” that has some good insights on building supply chain agility.

The article tends to focus on the macro view - over the long-term. The customers we deal with do, in fact, practice much of what is discussed here. The other thing they do, though, is to also attack the micro view. That is, what about day-to-day supply chain agility and the ability to sense and respond to daily changes in demand, supply, capacity or product.

Our customers find that constant volatility requires their organization to adopt these practices. They also find that optimization technologies were designed with the macro view in mind. That is, they operate on timelines more consistent with the longer-term. They take a lot of time to setup to do a simulation, require highly trained people to manage and take a very long time to run. Thus, they aren’t suited to the day-to-day responsiveness that they need.

The reality is that day-to-day response is a function of tradeoffs and compromises, and people need to be involved to make these decisions. Optimization technologies don’t support this, but Response Management does.

Just one more tool in your belt that can dramaticallly increase the flexibility of your supply chain network.

There’s a new post over at the National Association of Manufacturers entitled “The manufacturing outlook for 2006” that provides a link to some current research painting a positive outlook for manufacturing this year. Good news for everyone associated with this industry.

Colin Snow of Ventana Ressearch is highlighted an article here at Business Intelligence.com.

Colin describes the growing emphasis on this critical business process that seeks to align demand with supply. I’ve written about this a number of times here and here.

In the high-tech customers that we work with a lot, the challenges related to this process are many. First, most of these companies outsource a decent percentage of their business, meaning they are virtual enterprises spanning several parties. Second, things are changing at an incredible pace, meaning that while you’re trying to balance demand and supply, lots of assumptions are changing out from under you.

Our customers turn this process into one that is high in active participation (internal and external stakeholders) and is very fluid and dynamic. They develop best practices around being responsive to constant change. To do so, they make sure that all the people that need to be involved in the process have the right information and the right tools to collaborate and look at different scenarios for resolving any problems.

For these customers, their days are filled with tradeoffs and compromises. People need to be driving these decisions and they need information and tools to help them quickly make the right decisions with a clear understanding of exactly what the impact of that decision is going to be - before they make it.