Supply Chain Synchronization

Smart IT investments to manage inventory and manage logistics to generate revenue gains

Effectively managing inventory and managing logistics through smart IT investments are two of the areas that McKinsey identifies as generating "short- and medium-term revenue and efficiency gains that greatly exceed the savings from traditional cost-cutting efforts. The key is to have business and IT executives jointly take an end-to-end look at business processes and scan for opportunities such as improving the customer experience, reducing revenue leakage, and improving operating leverage.

The exhibit below illustrates the two fundamental ways for technology investments to have a substantial impact: developing new insights (for example, by comparing best practices across regions) or optimizing processes and systems, often with targeted work-arounds that generate value disproportionately."

 

McKinsey's February 2009 Chart Focus Newsletter.

ABC: An Introduction to Supply Chain Management - What is supply chain collaboration?

Ben Worthen’s compilation -- ABC: An Introduction to Supply Chain Management -- at CIO Magazine provides a good starting place for those wanting basics information about supply chain management. One of the questions he provides insights to is: What is supply chain collaboration?

There are many ways to describe supply chain collaboration. This can be done in areas ranging from forecasting and inventory planning to order management, and fulfillment planning. Worthen provides the following collaboration example from the world of consumer packaged goods to illustrate some of these basic concepts:

“If there are two companies that have made supply chain a household word, they are Wal-Mart and Procter & Gamble. Before these two companies started collaborating back in the '80s, retailers shared very little information with manufacturers. But then the two giants built a software system that hooked P&G up to Wal-Mart's distribution centers. When P&G's products run low at the distribution centers, the system sends an automatic alert to P&G to ship more products. In some cases, the system goes all the way to the individual Wal-Mart store. It lets P&G monitor the shelves through real-time satellite link-ups that send messages to the factory whenever a P&G item swoops past a scanner at the register.”

This example of supply chain collaboration benefits both parties. P&G benefits by knowing when to make, ship and display its products at Wal-Mart, and the invoicing and payments are automatically scheduled. P&G is able to reduce their inventory and their order-processing costs. Likewise Wal-Mart is assured of staying in stock on P&G products, while also receiving the best prices available.

Evavi Synchronized Demand Fulfillment

Fulfilling demand is essential to ensuring a great customer experience. Your customers depend on you to deliver products flawlessly, but when you have hundreds or even thousands of customers and products, that can be an ongoing challenge. To keep pace with rapidly changing customer needs, the demand fulfillment process must be flexible, extensible, and scalable.

By building from the core a fully synchronized solution on internet-native technologies that have been architected for the enterprise, Evavi now makes it possible to seamlessly capture, validate, and broker an order through the enterprise, while giving users complete visibility and control of the order at every stage.

Evavi Synchronized Demand Fulfillment transforms the demand fulfillment process to keep pace with the needs of your customers and to keep you ahead of your competitors.