Supply Chain Synchronization

Google's chief economist, Hal Varian, on how the web challenges managers

Google's chief economist, Hal Varian, "compares the current period to previous times of industrialization when new technologies combined to create ever more complex and valuable systems—and thus reshaped the economy." In a recent interview with McKinsey, he shares some of his insights.

Varian's ideas are organized in six main groups:

1. Flexible innovation
2. Corporations and work
3. Free goods and value
4. Workers and managers
5. Computer monitoring and risks
6. Reshaping industries

Varian discusses how networked digital technology should improve the way we work and increase productivity. In addition to personalization of data and better user interfaces, Varian emphasizes the importance of making sure that the data gets to all of the necessary players so that they can make timely and well-informed decisions. He also notes that since computers can monitor transactions, companies can make sure that transactions are carried out in the way intended.

At Evavi, we take this one step further with what we call "intelligent transactions." Rather than simply monitoring transactions and then correcting them, we seemlessly combine planning/decision support with execution/transactions so that supply chains operate optimally with transactions that are intelligently planned before they are executed. By eliminating the disconnect between planning and execution, the focus shifts from monitoring transactions to compressing the cadence of the supply chain with perfect orders.

You can view the interview here or read the transcript here.

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.

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.