There’s a very thorough article entitled “Operating in the Dark” about the challenges of operating in an outsourced environment without clear visibility into your supply network from Electronic Business over at the EDN site.

The article talks about issues that I’ve written about frequently here. Mainly that as companies have outsourced their manufacturing, a whole new set of challenges have been introduced. These challenges have made it extremely difficult for brand owners to meet their objectives in the midst of increasing global competition and less loyal customers.

In today’s environment, responding quickly and effectively to change is paramount to winning in the market place. Visibility is at the heart of being able to do this, but visibility alone is not enough. You’ve got to ensure that the right people, the people that need to be able to respond to change throughout the organization, are armed with this visibility and the tools they need to leverage that visibility into the appropriate timely action. This is the new supply chain management today that every company must deal with. Unfortunately, too many companies lack a strategic solution to this urgent problem and their employees are left to manage these problems with brute force.

The article also features case study information on Kinaxis customer Teradyne.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 1st, 2006 at 9:53 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.