When in Rome… December 19, 2007
Posted by Joseph Boyle in Inovis Solutions.trackback
I was going through my normal routine of checking out Oddly Enough News a few days back, and the headline that caught my eye was “Parking chief fired for illegal parking.” Recently in Rome, the city’s Traffic and Parking Chief lost his job after he was caught parking in a disabled parking spot using a permit that belonged to an eighty six year old woman. This guy was clearly not living within the rules he was enforcing.
Here’s the bottom line. When you’re trying to be in a leadership position, and you’re trying to drive the behavior of others, you’ve got to live (at the bare minimum) by the rules you’ve lain down, and ideally live a step above them.
This is also true within the supply chain. When you’re a hub and are trying to roll out and drive the adoption of electronic commerce standards within your suppliers, you had better be clean. You need to make sure that you are managing, maintaining, and driving the highest quality and consistency of data that you possibly can if you expect your suppliers to do the same.
If you’re going to hold your suppliers to strict standards, implement chargebacks, and other penalties for late or incorrect data; you’d better make sure that you have your own act together. Don’t be the Parking Chief parking illegally and trying to force others to follow a set of rules that you yourself are not following with your own data, timeliness, and accuracy.
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One other thing to consider along these same lines – and that is that the data you send is not only correct, but that the TP properly translates and uses the data on their side….
I just recently had a call from a TP wondering if we could change the percentage that we send in an SAC segment from the decimal display of a percentage (2% = .02) to a whole number (2% = 2.0). Apparently, the difference creates problems on their side.
So, while the data is correct, it’s the format of the data that the TP is having issues with.
Hi Craig
That is a great point, thanks for sharing. I absolutely agree – accurate data is critical, but is only part of a larger equation. This brings me back to an earlier post, What Superman Teaches Us About Standards. In order to collaborate, there must be flexibility of internal systems to allow for the sharing of (accurate) information in a format that can be standardized across the community. In most cases, the challenge of maintaining flexibility falls to the vendors. I am curious to know how you will be working this out with your supplier?