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Part - XIV

Visibility

As speed accelerates, the need for network-wide visibility increases because you can’t manage what you can’t see. Today, products and orders move through numerous information black holes as they navigate the supply chain. Companies need complete order and product visibility, and they are looking to extend this visibility to their customers, partners, and suppliers.

The challenge with providing supply chain visibility is that information resides and travels across multiple systems both inside and outside a company. Visibility is principally about connectivity. Flexible integration technologies that provide both data and process integration with alert engines that can push information to the right place are making this cross application and cross-company visibility a reality. Web-based portals layer on top of the integration technologies to provide usercustomizable information.

Boundary-less supply chain

The modern supply chain has no boundaries, exists as much in cyberspace as in the physical world. Leading-edge companies are rewriting their definitions of customers, suppliers, partners, and even competitors. Outsourcing is on the rise, and rivals are becoming partners. The virtual supply chain is all about flexibility and agility. By managing the supply chain in cyberspace, companies will be able to reconfigure their networks on the fly as market conditions change.

Today, few supply chains are self-contained. Organizations trade resources, resulting in a network of separate, but electronically interconnected businesses. Increasingly, competition is as much between supply chains as it is between companies. In this environment, the supply chain takes on the attributes of an independent organization forcing management across organizations to communicate and share goals, objectives, and information.

The Internet provides a wealth of new technologies that support the virtual supply chain. Collaborative planning, forecasting, and replenishment allow companies to cooperate over the Web in the planning process, reducing uncertainty in supply and demand. The growth in electronic marketplaces is a testament to the potential value in organizations building coalitions of trading partners. Inter-enterprise integration technologies allow organizations to move from just passing data to sharing information and synchronizing processes across organizations.

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* Contributed by -
Amit Mishra,
PGP 19188,
Indian Institute Of Management, Lucknow.