This presentation provides an overview of how global supply chains, particularly across the manufacturing sector have been impacted by disruptions over the years. From Earthquakes, flooding and limited export of rare earth materials from China, companies are having to redesign their supply chains and B2B infrastructures to build extra resilience against future disruption. This particular presentation discusses how B2B solutions can help to increase resilience across today’s global supply chains. Updated April 2013
B2B solutions can help to minimise supply chain risk in a number of ways. For the purposes of this presentation I just wanted to briefly highlight three key areas where B2B solutions can help companies minimise supply chain risk.B2B, especially via an outsourced or managed services approach can help to provide scalability and flexibility so that if supply chain disruption occurs then the exchange of transactions across your supplier community will not be impacted. Many of today’s cloud based B2B platforms utilise co-located data centre infrastructures, so that if one data centre goes down for any reason then it will automatically failover to the other data centre automatically.B2B solutions can also help to improve end to end visibility across global supply chains, you can keep track of shipments, monitor the performance of your multi-modal logistics partners and see when deliveries get to their final destination. These solutions typically help to identify weak points across a supply chain and hence allow alternative logistics providers to be sourced with ease.Finally B2B solutions can help to improve information management and communications which is the area that I will focus on for the remainder of this presentation.
In the first part of this supply chain risk video presentation series I highlighted how the Bank of Japan used eighteen criteria for assessing whether to approve loans or mortgages for businesses following the earthquake in Japan in early 2011. I mentioned that many Japanese companies faired well when it came to pulling together disaster recovery plans but they were very weak when it came to communicating a recovery plan out to business or trading partners.In fact this area of information management and communication was generally very weak. I have highlighted this area in green on the spider diagram.B2B solutions can certainly help to improve the flow of information and contribute significantly to increasing supply chain resilience.
One of the key areas where B2B tools can help minimise supply chain disruption is in the area of community management, after all when a natural disaster strikes you need to make sure you can remain in contact with your trading partner community or identify alternative sources for materials very quickly. Community management tools help in three ways.Firstly, community management tools can help to establish what can best be described as a centralised B2B contact directory, typically a self serving environment where all contact information for a particular supplier can be held. If working as part of a complex supply chain such as those found in the automotive or high tech sectors then they can also help you to understand the structure of these supply chains, effectively building a map of your supply chain. As a condition of doing business with some companies, suppliers will be forced to enroll through a predefined registration process to ensure that they provide all the relevant contact information concerning their business.
Secondly, community management tools help to improve command and control processes across your supply chains. They allow you to quickly assess the state of your supply chain in terms of identifying which suppliers have been impacted following a period of significant disruption.As the suppliers provided all their contact information during the registration process, community management tools allow you to send out mass communications with ease. You can also ask suppliers to complete online surveys to assess the condition of your supply chain, if they are unable to meet specific supply demand levels from their customers then you can quickly identify alternative sources for these components or parts. Dual sourcing of key components is becoming a popular method of combatting supply chain disruption and community management tools help to orchestrate the selection of alternative suppliers very quickly.
Finally, community management tools help to minimise supply chain risk. Companies deploy Microsoft office tools for creating documents, they implement ERP systems for managing production and employee processes so why not implement community management tools to help establish a dedicated IT infrastructure to help assess, manage and mitigate supply chain risk.When was the last time your company undertook a risk assessment of your supply chain, how long did it take to complete, did every company participate in the assessment, how did you apply scores and weightings to the results and what corrective actions did you take to mitigate future risk. The ability to assess the state of your supply chain via simple to use community management tools helps to bring a significant competitive advantage during a period of supply chain disruption. Has your company thought about setting up a trading partner risk database as part of a process of increasing resilience across your supply chain?
GXS Active Community is a community management tool that can help to build greater resilience to future supply chain disruptions. GXS Trading Grid, the world’s largest cloud integration platform, has traditionally focused on moving data from one location to another. GXS Active Community on the other hand has been designed from the ground up to manage the people to people interactions across a supply chain, an area that many companies tend to forget when extending or restructuring their supply chains.From establishing a centralised contact database for your trading partner community, through to deploying risk assessments, GXS Active Community improves the way in which you interact with your suppliers on a daily basis. Whether working with contract manufacturers in China, distributors in Eastern Europe or working with third party logistics providers in South America, GXS Active Community can provide a single global platform that can help improve the flow of information across your extended enterprise.
Comcast is one the world’s leading providers of information and communications products and services. In 2010 Comcast Cable embarked on a 100% paperless program to boost productivity and increase visibility into their supply chain. Comcast wanted to find a way of automating the process for collecting and managing vendor related information. They have over 100,000 vendors in their Oracle vendor master file. To keep the information current, Comcast relied on phone calls, exchange of emails and other manual, people intensive processes. One of the key problems they faced was duplicate entries and out of date addresses for vendors. The staleness and inaccuracy of the their data presented a potential regulatory risk as Comcast needed to provide revenue reporting for their vendors to the U.S tax authorities. If contact information is incorrect then Comcast could be faced with significant fines and a greater risk of audit.In addition to ensuring that vendor information was accurate, Comcast also wanted to automate the vendor registration process. Comcast sets up around 100 vendors each day and the vendors needed to submit a variety of regulatory documents as part of their enrolment process.Leveraging RollStream’s Application Program Interface allows Comcast to automatically extract the data from the vendor’s profile and provide an automatic update to their Oracle system. Now Comcast enables vendors to do self-service information management without providing vendors with direct access to the Oracle back end system.GXS RollStream has allowed Comcast to significantly reduce the cost of managing vendor related information, the risks of legal and regulatory fines and penalties have been minimised and the time to register and onboard vendors has been considerably reduced. More importantly if there is a disruption to the various services that Comcast offers to their customers then they are able to initiate a mass communication process with ease. In addition Comcast can now easily keep track of individual vendor responses for compliance purposes.
This brings us to the end of this series of video presentations relating to supply chain risk, we hope it has provided you with some insights in to how companies are trying to improve the management of their supply chains during periods of disruption.So I guess I should leave you with one last thought, is your supply chain prepared?