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.
