According to an IndustryWeek article entitled “Census Of Manufacturers: Too Many Supply Chains Are Failing To Integrate“, as supply chains lengthen globally, companies need to focus on tying together their suppliers and customers. Yet, too many companies are outsourcing their manufacturing whle ignoring the need to integrate the supply network into a cohesive whole.

According to the 2006 IW/MPI Census of Manufacturers, 34.1% of the 769 respondent companies indicate they have no integration at all with their suppliers, and 30.2% have no integration with their customers.

Why is this so important? Because without visibility across the entire supply network, partners can not coordinate activities to effectively respond to change - and rapid, accurate response to change is the key to winning in today’s market. Key decision makers throughout the supply network must be empowered to act quickly and decisively, and this requires visibility across the supply network and that everyone is looking at the same set of facts. Without this, the very people you depend on to drive rapid action are unable to collaborate to make the tradeoffs and compromises necessary to act. They need visibility and tools to help them do this - and it’s more important than ever as supply chains have become distributed supply networks.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 5th, 2006 at 7:02 am and is filed under Best practices, Response Management. 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.