There’s a good post over at Procure IQ entitled “The Global Supply Chain Benchmark Report” which features research done by Aberdeen.

One of the findings in the reports is that you should “extend supply chain visibility by moving to exception-based management of activities and increasing the number of monitored milestones.” The findings also promote greater business-to-business collaboration.

I couldn’t agree more. Global supply chains, increasing volatility and rising customer expectations mean you have to respond quickly and accurately or get left behind.

But the concern I continue to have with all of the recommendations about increasing visibility and “increasing the number of monitored milestones” is that the recommendations lack sufficient insight into what do do with the visibilty and exceptions on these milestones when they come up. There’s an inherent assumption that by just giving lot’s of data to people and having lot’s of exceptions you’re going to improve things. I haven’t seen this to be the case (admittedly, you’ll get some benefit, but not the breakthrough that you’re looking for).

To get value, information needs to be in the hands of the right people, information that is pertinent to their job. And, they need flexibility to “slice and dice” the data in different ways as the situation inevitably changes. But more important than the information itself are the tools that these people need to act on the information - robust analytics and simulation capabilities to solve problems.

There needs to be more discussion on what exactly we’re going to do with all of this newfound visibility.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 21st, 2006 at 11:37 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.