The Inovis Blog

It’s been an odd summer with almost constant rain and not too much excessive heat but one of the hot stretches coincided with a visit from friends that generated a need for an air conditioner in one of the bedrooms that did not already have one. The local store was out so went to one of the “big box” stores who swore they had what I needed but were unable to locate the small aircon needed. They had lovely models that would cool the average arena but that seemed somewhat excessive for a 12X15 room, so moved on to the other big-box store about a mile up the road.

As being in this industry tends to do, it got me to thinking about the REAL cost of not having your supply chain under control and the difference between DIGITIZING the supply chain and SYNCHRONIZING the supply chain. We all know how much effort has been put into standardizing and automating trading communities and that this has resulted in a profound improvement in efficiency both within the supply chain and, more importantly, in customer service. There is, however, still a critical failure around the synchronization of documents and the processes with which they’re associated. The first store I visited assured me that their system showed multiple air conditioners of the size needed were still in the store, but the empty shelves and pallets had far more reality than the information on the screen and I wondered how many other customers for both this and other products also went that mile up the road. To paraphrase a famous quip, “an PO and ASN are not the inventory” – unless these are synchronized with the received-to-sold flow of the product, they’re just characters in cyberspace and customers like myself will spend their dollars elsewhere for that item and probably start with the alternative the next time something is needed.