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Project eSCM: Electronic Supply Chain Management
Taking the next step in frictionless fulfillment
:: completed list main ::
The Internet has raised the importance of supply chain management to levels unimaginable five years ago. Every customer and every supplier is also a consumer of the eBusiness experience your company provides, and their expectations of speed, convenience, and service rise every day. Whether your company is a manufacturer, distributor, or service provider, superb supply chain performance is essential to attracting and retaining customers, and ease of online ordering is just the first step.
You must be able to deliver exactly what products and services the customer orders, when and where the customer wants them, and for the price the customer expects. When Web-enabled ordering is not backed up with strong supply chain management and fulfillment capabilities, your competitor is only a click away. In many companies facing stiff eBusiness competition, electronic supply chain management (eSCM) can make a greater contribution to customer satisfaction and business performance than any other strategic initiative.
Here's what it takes to succeed with eSCM:
- Sharp strategy. eSCM starts with enterprise-wide business strategy, business design, and commitment to commonality in key business processes and enabling technology infrastructure. You must go beyond supply chain management's traditional focus on incremental functional improvement, and look creatively at the entire domain of your business.
- Real-time information. Real-time demand and supply information must be visible up and down the entire value chain - from the end customer to the last supplier in the chain. Planning and rescheduling must operate in real-time across all supply chain players, and forecasting must give way to collaborative, flexible response to real-time customer demand.
- Pull, don't push. Insofar as possible, incorporate a "pull," or make-to-order, supply chain process rather than "push," or make-to-forecast. The "pull" model demands flexible product platforms and modular configure-to-order assembly capabilities. In return, it enables inventory reduction, customization, and customer control and satisfaction.
- Process integration. An end-to-end supply chain process should encompass the cash-to-cash cycle, from customer inquiry through fulfillment and collection. Effective business and cross-business operational integration requires compatible processes, information systems, data definitions, and performance measures. The more consistent these elements, the less friction and waste of time and inventory in the supply chain.
- eSCM meets eCRM. eSCM is all about delivering on promises to customers. eCRM (customer relationship management) is all about creating consistent and effective interfaces across all customer touch points and channels. Together, they enable a company to conduct anytime/anywhere business while maximizing customer satisfaction. Process integration, and the information systems behind it, must bridge the gap between SCM and CRM.
- Someone in charge. Too many companies still treat their supply chains as organizational orphans, with no clear executive accountability for the end-to-end process. In successful companies, process management supplants functional accountability, and process measures of speed, working capital turns, customer satisfaction, and asset utilization "pull" the business toward world-class performance.
- Solutions, not software. Implementing enterprise systems (ERP) and other software quickly and well usually matters much more than which package you pick. The hard parts in eSCM transformation are leadership, process integration, education and training, and change management. Technology isn't a fix, and technology issues are often the easy ones.
This Re.sultsŪ report articulates today's performance demands on supply chain management, and provides recommendations, frameworks, and guiding principles for developing eSCM strategy and raising supply chain performance to world-class levels.
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