If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

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.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 15th, 2006 at 8:17 am and is filed under Best practices. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.