I recently read our new white paper entitled “Why you Need to Re-evaluate Your Approach to Supply Chain Planning”. The paper describes how the old supply chain paradigm is not well suited to today’s dynamic, outsourced environment. It got me thinking about how communication has changed since the early 90’s when i2 and Manugistics were the pioneers – e-mail finally took that first step out of the domain of researchers; the web was under development by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN. As the paper points out companies in the 90’s were much more locally based and fully integrated (outsourcing and off-shoring were barely a glint in someone’s eye). So to collaboratively create or update plans or to collaboratively solve problems was accomplished by verbal communication among relevant participants – usually in the conference room or on the shop floor, depending on what needed to be done.

Fast forward to 2008 … virtually all of the manufacturers I talk to have significantly outsourced their manufacturing. In fact supply chains have been dramatically extended around the globe. Customers, contract manufacturers, suppliers are now located throughout the world. Even within individual companies the actors are spread around the world – demand managers in North America, supply planners in Asia, buyers in each of the regions. Communication, in a word – email! My new smart phone has voice, email, web browsing, and text messaging all in one (as well as music and a camera), but by far and away email is my most used communication tool. Given how participants in the supply chain are in virtually every corner of the world, email is a fantastic tool.

But is email a good tool to collaborate with? Is email not just a mechanism for transmitting words? I contend that in order for you to have a supply chain that fits the current and future dynamic, outsourced, off-shored environment we live in; flinging a spreadsheet over the virtual wall is not an effective form of collaboration. Well what about collaboration hubs or portals? Excellent tools for passing information, but can you really have effective collaboration?

My point here is that collaboration is about understanding the other party. Does your customer have a bias towards over or under forecasting? Are they planning a promotion? Opening new stores? Closing some stores? Are you the major purchaser of your supplier?

So in order to have a supply chain suitable for today and the future, understand the other person or company. Humans get a lot out of verbal communication – the inflections in the tone, the words chosen, the response speed, etc. Encourage verbal communication amongst the internal stakeholders. Pick up the phone and call your customers … get to know their business. Call your suppliers … find out how their business is doing.

TrackBack • Digg This • Add to del.icio.us
Tags: Collaboration, Supply chain planning
Posted in Supply chain collaboration
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.