What you need to know about supply chain management: while there are the occasional horror stories about botched SCM implementations, if you have a good understanding of what you want to achieve and a measured approach to implementation, you can prevent the nightmare from featuring your company

Automotive Design & Production, Feb, 2005 by Lawrence S. Gould

Further downstream, sophisticated calendaring options are now becoming a standard function within planning and execution software. According to the Gartner Group, this solves the problem of each trading partner having "different calendar requirements for period (weekly, monthly, yearly) start times, holidays, and shift start times." Not being able to synchronize calendars results in inconsistent views of time for an enterprise interacting with multiple trading partners.

Advances are occurring in "platform management." On the user side, vendors continue to develop thin-client software with an eye toward streamlined Web-based operations, data integrity and security, ease-of-use, and overall scalability. Workflows are now available that cross the back offices of multiple trading partners within a supply chain. Add to that XML and other Web services, which link the workflows to Web pages. Mind you, not all of this has to be created from scratch; predefined, but customizable, templates and decision alerts help when configuring software for specific supply chain needs.

On the server side, explains Thad Dungan, director of global solution marketing, automotive, for SAP (Detroit, MI), vendors are working on standardizing both the supply chain execution and the planning systems on one platform. This eases the maintenance, upgrade, and integration of software packages from multiple vendors, as well as eases scalability. And all of this will presumably reduce the total cost of ownership.

Software vendors are also working on flexible data aggregation and hierarchy definition. These two functions, says the Gartner Group, are key to data sharing between trading partners with dissimilar "hierarchies for viewing/processing time-phased data," as well as item and price data. Software products infused with XML and other Web services, along with the use of public and private data hubs and electronic trading places, are facilitating this data integration and consistency across an SCM implementation.

PROJECT MANAGEMENT IN SCM

While there are apocryphal stories of SCM implementations gone awry, with the software provider or consultant as culprit, Stephens thinks the blame is not always appropriately placed. "I am not comfortable that in all cases the practitioners know what they want to do other than 'to get better.' They don't know how to get better, and they're hoping the software provides the magic bullet."

Too often, what software vendors and consultants know about a business's needs is intuited from a checklist of software requirements the supply chain practitioner first puts out. Here's a better approach toward a more successful SCM implementation:

* Understand supply chain requirements from a business perspective. That is, explains Stephens, understand your business, the competitive requirements, and what the existing supply chain does or what a new non-existing supply chain is required to do to support the business. Adds White, "Go back to basics. What is core to your business? Where are you in the supply chain network? If you can't identify those, then it doesn't make any difference what you do."