When you gotta go, you ought to know December 11, 2007
Posted by Joseph Boyle in Supply Chain Visibility.Tags: contextual information, visibility applications, visibility in context
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I checked out Oddly Enough News the other day, and there’s a story entitled “Is that worth fifty cents? I guess so…” It’s kind of a funny story. In London, there’s a new service that helps pedestrians to identify the location of public restrooms. I guess when you gotta go, you gotta go. After reading the story, I started thinking, “Who would have thought people would be willing to pay money for someone to tell them where there was a restroom?”It’s really all about the value of contextual information, delivered in a timely matter. It’s the value of visibility in context. You may question who would possibly spend fifty cents trying to find a bathroom when you can just find it on your own—but time is money. When it comes to a restroom, there’s some urgency there. It’s the same with the supply chain. Time is money and time is critical. When you run out of time, you’ve got a real problem on your hands.
The same is true of supply chain visibility applications. We have people pose the question, “Why would someone pay to get visibility in a transaction when that person would be able to tell what happened by producing reports out of his or her data warehouse in three weeks?” My answer to this is that three weeks after the fact doesn’t often benefit your company the way it needed to.
It doesn’t help me to know twenty minutes after I needed to use the restroom where the bathroom was located. In the same regard, it doesn’t help your business to know three weeks after you have an illegal substitution that your supplier sent you the wrong thing. It helps to have that information before things hit the floor. If your business is on the go, you definitely want to be in the know.
