• Home
  • About Us
  • Contact Us
  • Privacy Policy
  • Special Offers
Business Intelligence Info
  • Business Intelligence
    • BI News and Info
    • Big Data
    • Mobile and Cloud
    • Self-Service BI
  • CRM
    • CRM News and Info
    • InfusionSoft
    • Microsoft Dynamics CRM
    • NetSuite
    • OnContact
    • Salesforce
    • Workbooks
  • Data Mining
    • Pentaho
    • Sisense
    • Tableau
    • TIBCO Spotfire
  • Data Warehousing
    • DWH News and Info
    • IBM DB2
    • Microsoft SQL Server
    • Oracle
    • Teradata
  • Predictive Analytics
    • FICO
    • KNIME
    • Mathematica
    • Matlab
    • Minitab
    • RapidMiner
    • Revolution
    • SAP
    • SAS/SPSS
  • Humor

What Murmuration And Supply Chain Collaboration Have In Common (Part 3)

January 18, 2020   BI News and Info
 What Murmuration And Supply Chain Collaboration Have In Common (Part 3)

Part 3 in the “Murmuration and Digital Supply Chain Collaboration” series

In Part 1 of this series, we discovered murmuration as a way for starlings to communicate extremely quickly and act in an extreme agile manner in large flocks. In Part 2, we discussed what companies, as part of large supply networks, can learn from murmuration. In Part 3, we will continue to discuss potential learnings.

Become the same species: Help others to become “starling-ish”

One of the reasons starlings can act in a flock is that they all belong to the same species. Applying this concept to business networks can be a challenge – many members of your supply chain will be in different industries and execute different business processes. Many members also exhibit different levels of maturity in how they plan and execute these different business processes. However, to help your supply chain become the same species, consider the following:

Develop your network: Invest in your network partners and actively share collaboration best practices. Make sure your network follows the same principles, and vice versa: Apply best practices from your partners and actively ask them to share those. One of my customers started to collect forecasts, PO’s, and related confirmations from its upstream network partners (4 tiers) in order to evaluate potential disruptions (see Figure 1 level 2). The project failed due to difficulties in the interpretation of the information and because some trading partners did not want to share the information.

Instead, they now just ensure that all trading partners introduce a best-practice collaboration process (see Figure 1 level 3), and share a six-month forecast on a weekly basis, receive forecast commits accordingly and receive order confirmations for all orders, as well as ASNs for all deliverables. This is also what they control as part of their audits.

Industry standards: Maintaining industry standards is the classic way to “starling-ize” your network partners. But because not all of your network partners are from the same industry, there’s always a certain degree of unharmonized processes. Still, you might want to apply best practices from other industries. For example, think of your automotive customer, who shares a scheduling agreement of 24 weeks with you. As a high-tech company, you do not create such long-term forecasts for your suppliers today. But why not share the transparency the scheduling agreement from your customer provides with your suppliers?

Map processes and technology: In cases where processes cannot be standardized across the network, you might want to invest in mapping capabilities from a technology perspective, where modern collaboration platforms provide large catalogs of reusable mappings and simple ways to create and test new ones; and from a process perspective, in which you interpret the information shared by the other partners (or at least have a clear understanding of the decision-making process of your trading partners) and apply the consequences to your own process. Create the exact same understanding of a supplier managed inventory process between you and your supplier.

The momentum created through recent digitalization waves is a great point in time to analyze internal and external processes, reduce side processes, and clean up the way you collaborate.

Become more agile

Communication with trading partners is one thing; receiving the information and quickly turning it into action is another. Starlings can perform incredible formations because they focus on simple rules and they do not carry any sort of buffer. In supply chain terms, they don’t carry operational buffers such as safety stocks, systematical buffers such as long lead time settings or lot sizes, or data buffers. Think about a company carrying more data than they can consume or interpret. The information noise will certainly slow down its agility.

Here’s an interesting case that shows the importance of agility and communication going hand-in-hand: I meet with companies on a weekly basis who report that their standard lead times have grown significantly over the past decades, due to simple safety measures caused by disruptive events in the past — but nobody ever revisits those lead time adjustments. Some organizations have planners who artificially inflate lead times to ensure the right time/quantity/quality of supply.

To become more agile, you might want to reset those parameters as part of a process standardization and digitization initiative. First, understand what your real lead times are by analyzing your and your trading partners’ shipping and receiving dates and applying predictive analytics. Second, mitigate the risk. The buffers have been introduced for good reasons. A tighter, automated collaboration with your trading partners helps to mitigate the risk once you reset your 20-day lead time to 10 days.

You’ll never be part of a murmuration if important network information is absorbed in error-prone, time-consuming manual processes. The right business network, which allows for different processes and technologies, will increase the chances of your supply chain “flock of starlings” behaving like a real flock.

Read the entire “Murmuration and Digital Supply Chain Collaboration” series.

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

Digitalist Magazine

chain, collaboration, Common, Murmuration, Part, supply
  • Recent Posts

    • The Easier Way For Banks To Handle Data Security While Working Remotely
    • 3 Ways Data Virtualization is Evolving to Meet Market Demands
    • Did you find everything you need today?
    • Missing Form Editor through command bar in Microsoft Dynamics 365
    • I’m So Excited
  • Categories

  • Archives

    • April 2021
    • March 2021
    • February 2021
    • January 2021
    • December 2020
    • November 2020
    • October 2020
    • September 2020
    • August 2020
    • July 2020
    • June 2020
    • May 2020
    • April 2020
    • March 2020
    • February 2020
    • January 2020
    • December 2019
    • November 2019
    • October 2019
    • September 2019
    • August 2019
    • July 2019
    • June 2019
    • May 2019
    • April 2019
    • March 2019
    • February 2019
    • January 2019
    • December 2018
    • November 2018
    • October 2018
    • September 2018
    • August 2018
    • July 2018
    • June 2018
    • May 2018
    • April 2018
    • March 2018
    • February 2018
    • January 2018
    • December 2017
    • November 2017
    • October 2017
    • September 2017
    • August 2017
    • July 2017
    • June 2017
    • May 2017
    • April 2017
    • March 2017
    • February 2017
    • January 2017
    • December 2016
    • November 2016
    • October 2016
    • September 2016
    • August 2016
    • July 2016
    • June 2016
    • May 2016
    • April 2016
    • March 2016
    • February 2016
    • January 2016
    • December 2015
    • November 2015
    • October 2015
    • September 2015
    • August 2015
    • July 2015
    • June 2015
    • May 2015
    • April 2015
    • March 2015
    • February 2015
    • January 2015
    • December 2014
    • November 2014
© 2021 Business Intelligence Info
Power BI Training | G Com Solutions Limited