The latest edition of IndustryWeek’s Manufacturing Business Challenge has been published.
This month’s challenge discusses a high-growth telecom company (with facilities, outsourcing partners, suppliers and customers spanning the globe) which is struggling with getting the data it needs for solid decision making.
I took part in providing one of the solutions, as did Nari Viswanathan, vice president and principal analyst for the Aberdeen Group’s Supply Chain Management Practice. Tell us what you think of our responses to the challenge as described below:
Over the course of 15 years I have grown FNZZS Inc. from a “geeky” little tech startup to a moderate-sized player in the telecom industry. We provide corporate wired and wireless communication systems for offices and field staff that incorporate voice with internet, email and social networking and blogging services. I started with two programmers, one tiny assembly facility, a handful of suppliers, and customers in a few states. FNZZS now produces for customers in 68 countries from eight global plants (six of our own facilities and two sites to which we have recently begun outsourcing subassembly) and works with hundreds of suppliers. Business has boomed, but so, too, has our supply chain management headaches.
The data we need to make literally any decision — mundane day-to-day actions to critical strategic planning — resides in different ERP systems, applications, and who knows how many spreadsheets (our own and that of customers, suppliers, and outsourcing firms). The timeliness and efficacy of our supply chain decision-making has suffered: we have repeatedly missed market opportunities, overlooked collaborative cost-savings with supply chain partners, and mismanaged regulatory adherence and customs/trade issues. It will only get worse as FNZZS continues to grow and rely on partners that hold key data outside of our direct control. My fear is that the patchwork of systems, applications, worksheets, and languages will grow and increasingly hide all kinds of data (manufacturing performance, design plans, customer orders, shipping schedules, etc.).
FNZZS is a cutting-edge technology company, and it must be able to swiftly make collaborative decisions with our supply chain partners to capitalize on lightning fast market changes. If we don’t, we’ll fail. I don’t see how that can happen in our current enterprise setup.
See our advice here. What advice would you give?
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Tags: Collaboration, Supply chain visibility
Posted in Supply chain collaboration, Supply chain management
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Fascinating Supply Chain “challenge” post. Kinaxis is well positioned to capitalise on the opportunity but could/should/would be even more successful if they outsourced the messaging and integration work to Perceptant (humble plug) – http://www.perceptant.com
One key to solving this challenge is to empower end-users with the technological control over their data. This kind of ‘data ownership” matters because increased technological ownership placed in the hands of information producers, over and above legislated notification requirements affording limited privacy protections, holds forth the promise of breaking up current and growing controversies centering on information ownership on the Internet. If further interested, I have written about this from a high-altitude in the white paper, Banking on Granular Information Ownership – http://tinyurl.com/bankdata
Lowering the altitude down to where the rubber is currently meeting the road, I would point to the emergence of Microsoft’s Geneva Framework for providing minimum disclosures (i.e., the kind of ‘data ownership’ of which I speak) using a Claims Based Access Platform. The Geneva Framework is the latest iteration of Microsoft’s CardSpace. Windows CardSpace (aka Windows Information Cards), part of the .NET stack, is Microsoft’s client software for the Identity Metasystem, an interoperable architecture for digital identity that enables people to have and employ a collection of digital identities based on multiple underlying technologies, implementations, and providers. If further interested, here are relevant links:
http://pardalis.squarespace.com/blog/2009/8/5/kim-cameron-why-openid-leads-to-information-cards.html
http://pardalis.squarespace.com/blog/2009/8/21/a-user-centric-identity-metasystem.html
http://pardalis.squarespace.com/blog/2009/8/30/roger-dean-interviews-kim-cameron-chief-msft-identity-archit.html
If the reader is interested in finding BOFs please consider joining the LinkedIn networking group ‘Data Ownership in the Cloud” at http://www.linkedin.com/e/vgh/1891037/