Visibility allows companies to track their products and business processes in a supply chain towards building operational excellence. The goal of supply chain visibility is to improve and strengthen the supply chain by providing critical information in form of business events readily available to all internal and external business partners.
Lately, the concept of supply chain event management is proving to be vital in a collaborative business environment, where it goes beyond providing status visibility to actually responding to critical events with a proactive business actions.
Supply chain event management
Supply chain events carry with them documentation (increasingly electronic) that enable systems to be developed to capture and respond to their occurrence in the supply chain. It is the establishment and documentation of these recordable supply chain events, and deployment of technology tools to monitor and report on these events, that constitute and create a supply chain event management system. The goal of supply chain event management is to improve supply chain effectiveness and reduce supply chain costs by managing events. This goal is achieved by reducing the variations in the supply chain and the number of surprises by changing unplanned events into planned events. This is accomplished by proactive notifications to supply chain managers when specific events occur (for example, inventories are depleted, shipments delayed), allowing managers to respond in a way that ensures customer satisfaction by putting in place corrective action plans for remedy.
Click here to read the full article in the May 2010 edition of Inside SAP.
