Supply Chains

Visibility Helps

By: Chris York

   Can You See Me?   Supply Chain Excellence requires everyone along the supply chain to work together. This cannot be done, however, if members of the supply chain cannot see one another.

     Visibility, the third level of Supply Chain Excellence, brings to light all links in the supply chain by providing trading partners access to internal information. It minimizes supply chain surprises because it provides the information trading partners need to understand ongoing forecast, manufacturing, order and shipping status.

     Through visibility, organizations come to understand their roles in a supply chain and are aware of the other links. Sharing information so that trading partners understand and have time to react to events such as order status updates, manufacturing schedules, advanced ship notices and shipment tracking numbers minimizes surprises. This requires commitment to the technology that makes internal information available not only within the company but also to select supply chain partners.

     The first step is to adopt an enterprise application integration (EAI) suite to tie together and capture all relevant data in disparate applications and databases such that they can be presented in a common format. Although this is a huge undertaking, it implements the infrastructure required to support the next two critical steps for visibility — executive information system (EIS) and supply chain event management (SCEM).

     An EIS (also called a dashboard) pulls together all key performance indicators (KPIs) and presents them via a browser in near real time, giving company management the information they need to make...

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