Supply Chain Synchronization

Evavi Fabric delivers the flexibility required for dynamic supply chains

During the past several weeks I've had the opportunity to take a deep dive with one of our clients into Evavi Fabric™. This client has been evaluating the difference between rigid packaged applications and custom software development to meet some supply chain needs.

Fabric is the planning and execution platform that the technology team at Evavi developed to power every Evavi solution. It includes common data models to enable the highest levels of synchronization and optimization across an extended supply chain.

Supply chain-centric businesses often need to support customer-specific processes that can not be supported by cookie-cutter ‘standard’ software applications. The attempts to customize one-size-fits-all solutions often result in ballooning IT spend, long implementation cycles, and costly maintenance.

Evavi Fabric™ is at the leading edge of a new approach to solve these problems, and the ideal platform for building synchronized supply chain applications. Fabric™ is a multi-company, multi-tenant SOA-based platform that leverages extensible business models and is packaged with proven reusable patterns and software components essential for today’s supply chain applications. Core components include: configurable business process engine, dynamic rules engine, personalization-ready portal, framework for user-level and data-level security, meta-tags, bookmarks, pro-active alerts, data synchronization components, and more.

Fabric™ enables Evavi to help clients realize measurable value and implement solutions the right way – collaboratively define requirements that precisely meet the clients’ needs; translate and render these requirements using Evavi Fabric™ solution patterns; and use a spiral tailoring approach to
configure the required functionality. This ensures that the production solution precisely meets the needs of the client, while the underlying technology helps protect their ongoing investment and reduces the total cost of ownership.

The Future of Enterprise Software

Wharton management professor Saikat Chaudhuri recently interviewed president and CEO of SAP Americas Bill McDermott for his views on where enterprise software is heading.

One clear theme emerged: that while legacy enterprise solutions were often helpful executing transactions, amassing lots of information, and then providing basic access to it, the future belongs to solutions that enable users to use the information effectively by synchronizing the execution of transactions with decision support (at Evavi we call this intelligent transactions, and is why our common platform embeds exception and alert management and performance measurement natively into every solution). The enablement of this capability helps companies to close the gap between planning and execution.

McDermott, obviously, believes that SAP will be the winner in this space. He states that "the number-one competitive advantage for SAP over a company like Oracle is integration. Companies like Oracle have to interface things and deal with very complex implementations because none of that has been engineered by design, and there may be different pieces of different acquisitions all in the same solution, and customers really have to navigate through that. It's very costly to do that for the customer. It's very risky to do that for the customer... Oracle, as an example, has acquired all their growth. Unfortunately for the customer, none of that has been integrated on a common platform."

While the importance of a common platform should not be underestimated, even more important is that enterprise solutions must also have common data models in order to achieve the fullest level of business process synchronization. This is one of the areas that all of the legacy software vendors will have difficulty matching the capabilities of the new enterprise software companies that are innovating in this area. The cost to deploy, run, and maintain these new solutions is much, much less than the legacy solutions.

Flexibility in the Face of Disaster: Managing the Risk of Supply Chain Disruption

For almost two decades, companies have been deploying technologies and changing processes in an effort to tighten their supply chains and reduce their inventories. To the extent that this has been successful, companies have opened themselves to increased disruption when something goes wrong. Now some forward-looking enterprises are looking at how to best manage the risk that comes with these disruptions.

Flexibility in the Face of Disaster: Managing the Risk of Supply Chain Disruption is an article by supply chain experts from Wharton and The Boston Consulting Group. It is a part of their special Creating the Optimal Supply Chain report.

The article opens with the following explanation: “When it comes to global supply chains, the potential for disruption comes in many forms, from large-scale natural disasters and terrorist attacks to plant manufacturing fires, wide-spread electrical blackouts, and operational challenges such as shipping ports too small to handle the flow of goods coming into a country. Today's leaner, just-in-time globalized supply chains are more vulnerable than ever before to natural and man-made disasters -- a reality that creates greater demands on companies to keep supply chains flexible and integrate disruption risk management into every facet of supply chain operations.

“Given the high stakes, experts from BCG and Wharton generally agree that managing supply chain disruptions revolves around two goals: first, to thoroughly understand the potential of identified risks; and second, to increase the capacity of the supply chain -- within reasonable limits -- to sustain and absorb disruption without serious impact.”

The article continues with sections on “Identifying the Risks”, “Discovering Vulnerabilities”, “Contingency Planning and the ‘Triple-A’ Threat”, and “Redundancy and Other Strategies for Flexibility”.

ABC: An Introduction to Supply Chain Management - What are the roadblocks to installing supply chain software?

Ben Worthen, at CIO Magazine, has compiled ABC: An Introduction to Supply Chain Management. This compilation provides a good starting place for those wanting to learn about the basics of supply chain management.

One of the questions he looks into is: What are the roadblocks to installing supply chain software? His answer looks at three typical roadblocks that can be anticipated and should be preempted:

1) Gaining trust from your suppliers and partners.

“Supply chain automation is uniquely difficult because its complexity extends beyond your company's walls. Your people will need to change the way they work and so will the people from each supplier that you add to your network. … To get your supply chain partners to agree to collaborate with you, you have to be willing to compromise and help them achieve their own goals.”

The degree to which your people will need to change the way they work will be dictated by what business processes you are changing, and how flexible the software is to accommodate the elements that are unique to your business. Ideally you will transform business processes because they will improve your business, and not because the software dictates that you do things in a circuitous way. Supply chain solutions should only be considered that are flexible enough to model what is unique about your business, rather than forcing you to change those things that your customers already value. You should be able to tailor role-based workflows that perfectly fit the needs of the business, and that support adoption by end-users. This is a foundational concept of Supply Chain Synchronization that distinguishes it from simple Supply Chain Management.

2) Internal resistance to change.

“If selling supply chain systems is difficult on the outside, it isn't much easier inside. Operations people are accustomed to dealing with phone calls, faxes and hunches scrawled on paper, and will most likely want to keep it that way. If you can't convince people that using the software will be worth their time, they will easily find ways to work around it. You cannot disconnect the telephones and fax machines just because you have supply chain software in place.”

Without successful change management, most supply chain initiatives will flounder and may ultimately fail. Some clients I have worked with have forced supply chain solutions in without gaining the necessary consensus from the end-users. This normally results in additional time and money to cycle back after the implementation to train, cajole, and encourage the end-users to get on board -- much more effective to get this done at the beginning of the project.

3) Many mistakes at first.

“There is a diabolical twist to the quest for supply chain software acceptance among your employees. New supply chain systems process data as they are programmed to do, but the technology cannot absorb a company's history and processes in the first few months after an implementation. Forecasters and planners need to understand that the first bits of information they get from a system might need some tweaking. If they are not warned about the system's initial naiveté, they will think it is useless. … Once employees [understand] that they [are] merging their expertise with the system's increasing accuracy, they [will begin] to accept and use the new technology.”

The best supply chain software has the ability to be programmed in advance with as much of a company’s historical data as can be obtained. However, even when this is done, the system will take a while to reach equilibrium. Supply chain solutions are designed to be intelligent – they learn as they go. At the same time, most supply chain functions (such as forecasting and inventory planning) are not designed to run on autopilot. These solutions require regular monitoring and adjusting (though the best ones will automatically direct the end-user to the places that need the most attention). End-users need to understand that they are indeed merging their expertise with the system’s intelligence. Working in concert, the results can be spectacular.

Getting smart about supply chain management

McKinsey consultants Mani K. Agrawal and Minsok H. Pak wrote a feature article for The McKinsey Quarterly back in 2001. Their article, Getting Smart About Supply Chain Management, is focused on B2B marketplaces.

In their article they point out that: “The promise of real benefits rests on the potential for seamlessly integrating data flows and work processes across entire enterprises and even industries.”

Agrawal and Pak also acknowledge that: “Although B2B exchanges (otherwise known as e-marketplaces) can help companies realize certain purchasing and transaction-processing benefits in the short term, broader improvements—particularly reductions in inventory, improved service levels, faster time to market—are harder to achieve.”

So, where do we stand 6 years later?

To achieve the gains that Agrawal, Pak and many others envisioned, the underlying technologies needed to become more mature and sophisticated. Not only did EAI tools for integrating data flows need to become more robust and prevelant, but the supply chain software necessary to flexibly model business processes across the extended enterprise, and to unite planning with exectution, had to be developed. Many of the supply chain software platforms remain locked in their legacy code base, and this has impeded this transformation. At the same time, a new generation of supply chain solutions has begun to emerge that provides these capabilities out-of-the-box. The most innovative of these new solutions couple planning with execution, provide common data models that are flexible and extensible, and have native performance measurement, personalization, and alerts. Supply Chain Synchronization is an example of the new class of supply chain software that has emerged to fulfill the vision that so many have articulated for so long.

If you are interested in revisiting the McKinsey article, here is the abstract:

"Although business-to-business (B2B) e-marketplaces can help companies realize certain purchasing and transaction-processing benefits in the short term, broader improvements—particularly reductions in inventory, improved service levels, and faster time to market—are proving more elusive. What will it take to succeed? Seamless integration of data flows and work processes across entire enterprises and even industries holds the key. The power of B2B exchanges would have to be combined with the enterprise-resource-planning and decision-support systems that many companies have adopted in recent years."

ABC: An Introduction to Supply Chain Management - What does supply chain management software do?

ABC: An Introduction to Supply Chain Management is a compilation by Ben Worthen at CIO Magazine. It provides a good starting place for those wanting to learn about the basics of supply chain management.

One of the questions he provides insights to is: What does supply chain management software do?  In answer to that question, Worthen points out that “Supply chain management software is possibly the most fractured group of software applications on the planet. Each of the five major supply chain steps … composes dozens of specific tasks, many of which have their own specific software. Some vendors have assembled many of these different chunks of software together under a single roof, but no one has a complete package that is right for every company. For example, most companies need to track demand, supply, manufacturing status, logistics (i.e. where things are in the supply chain), and distribution. They also need to share data with supply chain partners at an ever increasing rate.”

When you are evaluating supply chain solutions, be sure to understand how Supply Chain Synchronization differs from the fractured environment of traditional Supply Chain Management software. One of the main areas of differentiation is that Supply Chain Synchronization uses a common platform and common data models to enable business processes across the enterprise. This, combined with native personalization, exception and alert management, performance measurement, and role-based workflows enables companies to let their strategy drive their supply chain solution, instead of being constrained by it.

Worthen goes on to note a hugely important point for those working on supply chain strategies. He writes: “It’s worth mentioning that the old adage about systems only being as good as the information that they contain applies doubly to SCM. If the information entered into a demand forecasting application is not accurate then you will get an inaccurate forecast. Similarly, if employees bypass the supply chain systems and try to manage things manually, then even the most expensive systems will provide an incomplete picture of what is happening in a company’s supply chain.”

So, as you work on your supply chain strategy, be sure to spend time working on the change management that will be needed to successfully deploy, run, and maintain your supply chain solution. My experience has been that in their eagerness to get started, this is the area that most companies are prone to overlook.

Evavi End-User Innovations

Personalization
Every end-user can personalize their workspace to meet their distinct work habits without requiring additional software.

Exception and Alert Management
Every user has the ability to publish, subscribe, and manage exceptions and alerts as an integrated capability of their personalized workspace.

Performance Measurement
Every user is presented with actionable information and meaningful reports in their personalized workspace without requiring bolt-on business intelligence software.

Role-based Workflows
Every user has workflows that are designed for their specific role rather than one-size-fits-all workflows.

Usability
All users, not just those with deep experience operating back office applications, can readily leverage the system.

Evavi Innovation

Overview
We set out with an audacious vision – to reinvent enterprise supply chain management. We have built from scratch a synchronized enterprise supply chain suite that uses only the best internet-native technologies and leverages the knowledge gained from the evolution of supply chain management since the late ‘80s.

The solutions we are delivering are based on more than six years of development by some of the most creative minds in the supply chain business. Members of this team helped define the supply chain software industry in the late ‘80s and early ’90s with their pioneering work in the areas of in-memory optimization and planning. The supply chain software they architected during that time generated over $800 million in sales, generated billions in supply chain value, and launched the industry.

Supply Chain Software Reinvented
Evavi’s Supply Chain Synchronization solutions are the first to be entirely developed and delivered with Internet-native technologies. Built into the entire solution suite from the core are a planning and execution platform, flexible models, rapid extensibility, open integration, performance measurement, exception and alert management, role-based workflows, and consumer-Web usability with personalization at the fingertips of each end-user.