The Inovis Blog

Image Credit: http://www.nonformality.org/

As the Director of Field Operations at Inovis, I love the time that I get to spend working with customers and hearing about their challenges. I’m able to collaborate with them, tell them about what I see with other customers, and am able to recommend solutions.

Lately, I’ve had the opportunity to be engaged in a number of scenarios where our large customers (hubs) are communicating to us the process that they go through to bring up new suppliers and how time consuming and difficult that process can be for them.

At Inovis, we understand that. The foundational history of our business has always been our ability to work with the total supply chain to share a common vision around electronic commerce so that we may then be able to deploy the solutions to both the hubs and spokes that are required to make that vision a reality. But, it goes deeper than that.

There’s a layer of communication and process that has to wrap around the technology to help that vision come true. It’s that ability to not only get on the same page that everyone wants to do electronic commerce, but to also share the standards and business practices that are going to support that. Then, as a next step, test to make sure the vendor is really ready to satisfy those requirements. These days, we’re able to take it a step further.

As electronic commerce evolves and is continually refined, there is a need to address issues that allow for better collaboration. One of the issues we’re hearing vendors discuss is, “OK, great, you guys can help us with the whole end to end on-boarding and enablement process. That’s a huge driver for us and it speeds our ability to market and drives cost out of the supply chain. So, we’ve gotten better there. Now it exposes the next problem in our process which is that we test and certify our vendors on day one, and when we take them into production on day 5, all of the sudden their data is all wrong.” This issue goes to show that electronic commerce and collaboration between partners is always on the move and always changing. Today’s world requires more than static testing to ensure collaboration between partners.

That certification and testing snapshot that you took isn’t the end all be all – organizations need to continually monitor the performance of their supply chain so that issues errors can be eliminated. Inovis has the ability to take the same business rules and test scenarios that we created for you when you were on-boarding that supplier and then extend them out through your ongoing collaboration. We can use the same rules and the same test procedures to monitor the exchange of information between you and your suppliers on an ongoing basis to make sure they remain in compliance and to help you identify those partners that are having key failures, help you work those vendors through a remediation process, and provide self healing systems that will allow you and your vendor to gain efficiency in how you operate together.