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Part - XI

• Fulfillment - CPFR does not extend to many of the other parties involved in the fulfillment process. For example, transportation carriers, forwarders, public warehouse operators, are not yet part of any standard collaborative process.

• Joint optimization - collaborative relationships allow enterprises to start optimizing operations outside the walls of the enterprise and across entire supply chains. Today's collaborative efforts are laying the foundation of trust and joint business processes that will enable future supply chain optimization.

• Real time collaboration - most of the processes in use, in testing, and in development focus on planning activities. Many of the problems, however, arise in real time while the product is moving and the unexpected happens. Clearly, better planning and forecasting will yield a smaller number of real time discrepancies - but processes for collaborative problem solving in real time, based on data from visibility tools, can help retailers avoid stock-outs and manufacturers avoid plant stoppages.

8. Conclusion

CPFR is the latest in an array of collaborative schemes aimed at better coordinating supply chain, thereby squeezing out decoupling inventory from the system. The roots of CPFR can be traced to the ECR and VMI/CMI initiatives. Unlike these initiatives, however, CPFR was designed as a balanced collaborative approach where all forecasts and exception are communicated to both retailers and manufacturers and the collaborative process of solving these exceptions is carefully laid out. It is also supported by much more robust software - in particularly, strong exception engines that can deal with a very large number of retail selling points, vendors, and SKU-s, as well as various aggregations of these data.

While this paper focuses on the promise of CPFR, one has to remember that as one of the latest trends in supply chain management, consultants and software vendors are touting CPFR as the next "silver bullet." This paper shows that CPFR is a continuation of many collaborative business trends. As such, it will be only as successful as the underlying desire to actually collaborate and the incentive system that drives behavior in the collaborating partners. While CPFR may be supported by more robust software than earlier collaborative movements, it still requires a significant dedication of effort on the part of the collaborating partners, and while companies may be able to have more CPFR relationships than CMI, such relationships will still be reserved for their top vendors and customers.

Concluded.

* Contributed by -
Deepak Bisht & Nilesh Dewangan,
Students of PGDIE,
NITIE, Mumbai.