Supply Chain Synchronization

The importance of supply chain agility and transformation

In an interview with Wharton@Knowledge, information and technology professor Hau L. Lee of Stanford University's Graduate School of Business shared ideas about supply chain agility and transformation. His comments about agility are especially relevant today because, as he points out, agile supply chains are the ones that win when "there is an external disturbance and companies respond accordingly -- when their competitors cannot do so...." Today we are in just such an economic environment, and tomorrows winners are locking in market share today.

Lee also points out the need to move beyond pure agility to offer transformed solutions that substantially change the nature of your supply chain value proposition with your trading partners. For those companies operating throughout Asia, Lee believes that the importance of transformed solutions "is even more important because the needs for customisation and solutions are even higher due to the diversity in needs and capabilities."

Here is an excerpt from this insightful interview:

"The first thing companies should do is to ensure that the supply chain is done well. That means eliminating waste, removing inefficiencies, and not having any value-added activities. However, all this is purely a margin improvement exercise. Often times, what we have found is that once a good process is in place, it will enable companies to respond to the different needs of their customers. And these are where the opportunities lie. Any time there is an external disturbance and companies respond accordingly -- when their competitors cannot do so -- they will be able to grab that market share. Once they gain market share, it is very hard for competitors to grab it back. Essentially, companies should try and be responsive, through using the supply chain process, to take advantage of unexpected events. This is what agility is about.

"It is not just a question of unexpected events, however. In being agile, companies which have many customers with different needs and geographies, will realise they can serve more customers with more customised solutions. Those solutions will allow them to reach out to markets that they have not been able to reach out to before. The next stage is to think about what the customer needs. Is it just the product or is there a way that they want certain things done? For instance, let’s say I am a cement company and my customers buy cement from me. The customers need cement not because they want to store it at home but because they are constructing something. So, can I do something that would make their construction easier? Can I help them buy other things and put these together for them? That is what 'transformed solutions' are about.

"I think the more mature companies will go down the path of providing more complete solutions. As start-ups, most companies have a single product and they will want to make that well and efficiently. But mature companies must evolve for that is the way to create intimacy and stickiness with the customer, making it harder for them to switch loyalties. Once companies provide complete solutions, for example by helping customers design and manage projects, it is harder for customers to make that switch."

The complete interview can be read here.

Business flexibility constrained by legacy software

A client of mine sent the following video to me thinking that this was Evavi's. As companies work to free themselves from rigid, inflexible legacy systems, solutions such as Evavi's Supply Chain Synchronization offer new levels of flexibility and extensibility. If this video represents some of the challenges you are facing with your supply chain, we'd be glad to talk about how we are delivering the enterprise software of the future -- today.

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.

Driving down total cost of ownership while increasing flexibility

Many times traditional supply chain solutions are obsolete on the day they go-live because the deployed solutions are built on rigid technology platforms resulting in functionality that is frozen in time. The reality is that in the supply chain space collaborative business processes must regularly and rapidly adapt to meet changing demands of trading partners.

For true cost competitiveness, the supply chain space requires software that is inherently flexible and configurable and can accommodate the dynamically changing needs of markets, trading partners and the extended enterprise – as opposed to traditional ERP applications that are rigidly packaged to support one-size-fit-all practices, primarily function within the four walls of an enterprise, and do not need to be regularly modified to accommodate needs dictated by others.

Many companies have found that packaged solutions are simply too rigid to either accommodate what is unique about their supply chain or too inflexible to rapidly model changes required by trading partners. As such, they have often built their own systems – an approach that is often costly, time-consuming, and risky. For several years now software companies specializing in supply chain solutions have been trying to find the right balance between out-of-the-box functionality and a custom development.

To meet the unique needs of the supply chain space, my partners at Evavi have developed solution patterns within Evavi Fabric™. These solution patterns let companies rapidly deploy the underlying essential functionality required by most enterprises while allowing for the precise tailoring of the final solution in a cost-effective manner all within the core Evavi Fabric. This approach reduces costs and protects the investments of our clients.

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."

Evavi Technology Innovations

Planning and Execution Platform
The solution unifies planning and execution business processes that traverse traditional functional boundaries, and provides real-time information by eliminating legacy data silos.

Common Data Models
Comprehensive set of meta-data models that enable real-time sharing of information between business processes.

Flexible & Extensible Models
The solution is built on models that are flexible enough to capture those elements that differentiate your business and can accommodate rapidly changing business needs.

Configurable Business Processes
Integral business process engine to configure your business workflows requirements without requiring changes to the code.

Rapid Extensibility
You can rapidly configure and extend the solution to fit your unique requirements without incurring punitive costs or risks.

Open Integration
The solution easily connects to legacy and other disparate data sources within your four walls and throughout the extended enterprise.

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.

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.