The Visible Supply Chain: Ensuring End-to-End Optimization

The Visible Supply Chain

Ensuring end-to-end optimization
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Aligning Business and IT to Improve Performance
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© Copyright Ventana Research 2007 Do Not Redistribute Without Permission Ventana Research - The Visible Supply Chain Table of Contents Visibility Needed ......................................................................................3
What Visibility Contributes.......................................................................3
The Visible Supply Chain ..........................................................................4
Technology Pathways to a Visible Supply Chain.......................................4
Strategizing for Supply Chain Visibility ....................................................6
About Ventana Research ..........................................................................6
© Ventana Research 2007 Page 2 Ventana Research - The Visible Supply Chain Visibility Needed Today's supply chain is, of course, the primary processing mechanism of every manufacturing company. But it's more than that: Its multifaceted, multicompany, multinational structure makes it the most complex management challenge found in any enterprise. Supply chain management no longer means just making sure that the right resources and the right materials move to the right place at the right time. Today, it also means ensuring that the entire chain of events involved in producing goods and distributing them to customers satisfies customers, minimizes costs and maximizes profit. Clearly, managing a supply chain in this fashion requires information, but exactly what that means is not obvious. Merely pushing information about partners or products into a report that lands on a manager's desk every day will not achieve the goals. Nor will a dashboard, even if it delivers that same information in real time. What today's supply chain managers need instead is a supply chain that is visible. "Visibility" in this case means that data about the supply chain is delivered in a way that enables managers to know whatever they need to know whenever they need to, at whatever level of detail they need, and that allows them to analyze the data and take action based on the results of their analysis. The essence of supply chain visibility is the ability to know the location and status of all physical components, from raw materials to finished goods, as they move from suppliers through the stages of production to delivery to customers. Defined this way, supply chain visibility is a tall order, but some of today's IT systems can meet it. This paper will describe the characteristics of a visible supply chain, explain why having one is important and discuss the technology resources that can deliver it to you.
What Visibility Contributes Business performance management relies on data that is readily accessible to managers, but data accessibility alone is not sufficient to make the supply chain visible. It is truly visible only if the data is accessible within a context that gives it meaning and can make it useful as part of a decision-making process. Context is especially important in today's information-rich enterprise environments because it is easy to overload users with too much data, from too many sources, presented to them with too little context of how it relates to other data and business processes and activities. In addition, most business decisions today require collaboration, so visibility also requires that the information be shared among colleagues. And visible systems offer users an analytic framework within which they can work with their information. Business intelligence (BI) systems are frequently used as the analytic tools of choice because they can pull data together from disparate sources and make sense of it, which is necessary in creating a visible information environment. The analysis enhances visibility by providing an additional context for the information. F... [download for more]