Use what you already have to get moving with Visibility September 26, 2007
Posted by Randal Stocker in Supply Chain Visibility.trackback
My 11 year old daughter is again playing fast pitch softball this season. We decided to go to the batting cages last weekend to dust the cobwebs off before the season started. After 12 tokens worth of swings she decided she had enough and that left one unused token (bakers dozen package!). I decided to use that last token for myself.
Using her 28” youth softball bat was an experience. While I would have liked to use a longer bat that was more appropriate for me (I normally use a 34” bat) I was able to get the job done and pound some nice hits. If I was to use her small bat in a game situation it would be unlikely that I would hit a homerun, but surely I would get some base hits.
This reminded me of the 5 or 6 times in my career where I witnessed Senior IT Management selecting a solution that required a major implementation project when tweaking or leveraging an existing solution would have got the job done. While I fully understand the credo of sustainable, extensible and supportable “build a foundation to move forward on and take the company to the next level” there are times when the technology or solution are simply not mature enough or the project will be so disruptive as to not provide much real value. I am relatively new to Inovis and am currently focusing on supply chain visibility and other supply chain excellence initiatives.
I have been researching the state of supply chain visibility and BPM solutions and my take on the current crop of solutions on the market is that they tend to offer great promise, they tout utopian concepts such as integrated BPM, exposing 2nd and 3rd level supplier visibility and actionable intelligence/predictive workflow without actually having what I would consider a solution that could be implemented completely enough to provide the information needed. I assume many software vendors just do not appreciate how complex trading relationships and business processes can be and the multitude of data sources there are.
The reality is there is no killer app in supply chain excellence yet. It’s my opinion that solutions that exist today are just not mature enough yet – they do not fully leverage SOA architecture and/or support the enablement of places to get information. I am working to create a roadmap at Inovis for supply chain excellence but I refuse to follow the commonly accepted model of requesting carbon copies of all your trading documents and business transactions to an aged central repository. That just seems like wasted time, money and effort for everybody.
My recommendation until the day a killer app exists is to execute incremented steps to build a foundation of knowledge. Go ahead and use the bat that is probably too short and hit some singles. Leverage your existing VAN transactions as the system of record for real time transaction monitoring and analysis. There is a tremendous amount of meaningful and usable data flowing through your VAN today. Signing up for a hosted model from your VAN to test the visibility waters is actually a nice proof-of-concept to further refine your business processes definitions and requirements.
If you have thoughts and idea’s on where you would like to see your supply chain visibility, BPM or supplier self-service initiatives go then just send me an email. Randal.Stocker@inovis.com
What’s in my MP3 player today? Reverend Horton Heat.
Randy
