Is your enterprise ready for visibility?
-- Modern Materials Handling, 5/15/2001
Today's consumer wants to track order status in real time, as we point out in our recent story "Careful! They may be watching!" But in order to offer visibility, your company must be prepared.
The benefits of visibility don't just flow from implementing a visibility application, any more than slapping up a Web site ensures e-commerce success.
Instead, visibility and event management solutions are a piece of a much larger supply chain and order-fulfillment puzzle that begins with addressing basic business processes.
| "You don't want to provide a window into chaos." |
"Don't even think of supply chain visibility until you've got your internal act together," warns John Hill, a principal with eSYNC International, Chicago.
Why? Because, Hill says, opening up your systems is like installing a Web camera in your warehouse. "You don't want to provide a window into chaos," says Hill.
John Pulling, chief operating officer for Provia Software, Grand Rapids, Mich., concurs. "We've seen situations where people implemented a visibility solution, but still batched the orders they picked and shipped that day to a legacy system at the end of the shift," says Pulling. "In some instances, their customers ended up receiving an e-mail alert that an order was being picked after the order had already been delivered."
Where you lay the foundation for a visibility solution depends on where your company is positioned today, and where you want to be in 3 to 5 years.
| "The best way to move forward is to assess your strengths and weaknesses and start where the greatest return on investment is." |
Hill advises his clients to identify the areas most in need of improvement and then to phase in systems as gradually as business conditions will permit. "The best way to move forward is to assess your strengths and weaknesses and start where the greatest potential for return on investment exists," says Hill.
For instance, a manufacturer or distributor stuck with too much inventory might have a crack team running its warehouses while doing a lousy job of forecasting demand. "In that case, the answer might be an aggressive supply chain planning system rather than jumping into a warehouse management system," says Hill. "Without a good planning system, a WMS will just help you stuff more inventory that never moves into your facilities."
Once your business processes are in place, you need data to manage your supply chain and provide visibility. Whether it's bar codes, voice recognition systems, or wireless radio frequency data capture, these technologies capture the data at key points in the journey through the supply chain.
What's more, that data needs to be in real time to eliminate the information float created by traditional methods of data capture. Real-time systems put an end to the gap between the time when inventory is picked, packed, and shipped and when the records showing it as available-to-promise or in need of replenishment are updated.
Integration within an enterprise and then across a supply chain follows data capture. Success here comes from moving surely, but cautiously, says Paul Albright, president and CEO of SeeCommerce, a Mountain View, Calif., provider of visibility systems.
| "Too many of the companies we see trying to integrate their supply chains are trying to do too much too fast." |
"Too many of the companies we see trying to integrate their supply chains are trying to do too much too fast and are running into problems," says Albright. "We advise our customers to evaluate their business model and objectives to see if their systems can support both in an electronic economy. Then, we tell them to integrate within the four walls of their business. Only after they've done that do we recommend they open up their systems to their trading partners, and we suggest they begin that process slowly. They might integrate with Tier I suppliers first, then distributors, then invite in their customers."
The visibility systems can, in fact, create the platform for integration within the enterprise and across the supply chain. The visibility system not only collects information, it stores it in a format that is accessible to all the trading partners, regardless of what systems they have. That means that your customers and suppliers don't have to rip out their systems in order to communicate with you.
Is your enterprise ready for visibility?
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