| Stay Competitive Servicing Clients: Get on the Supply Chain Information Grid |
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| Written by Rob Guerriere | |||||
| Wednesday, 01 July 2009 | |||||
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How to get visibility, common demand metrics, and key performance indicators with SAAS-I-BAK-PEDIA for MJIT. Do you remember the long lines at the grocery store before they began scanning bar codes? We need a price check on check-out number 6. Remember? You needed a check-out strategy. You eye up the speed of the check-out girl, the size of the carts, how much produce and meat compared to the package goods. How about getting in line now while Mom grabs the last few items on isle 12? It was 35 years ago that the first item was scanned. It was a pack of Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit chewing gum and it was scanned at Marsh’s supermarket in Troy, Ohio on June 26th, 1974. The pack of gum is now on display at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History. Also interesting, is that the check out girl who scanned it, Sharon Buchanan, just retired from that same store in 2007. At that time, no one had any idea how much of an impact the bar code was going to make on our lives. Today, we have another marriage of innovation and technology. It has to do with a small industry that developed in size and potential with the Internet and has now matured into a foundation block of how business is conducted. Electronic Data Interchange (EDI), has been the format of how business transactions like purchase orders, shipping notices, invoices, and electronic funds transfers, have been transacted for the majority of businesses, particularly in the distribution of a product, for the last 25 years. With the ubiquity of the Internet, the EDI space was flattened and Internet technology allowed anyone with an email address to do EDI. EDI networks like GXS, Inovis, Sterling Commerce (AT&T), SPS Commerce, EDS (HP), and nuBridges, operated as an electronic post office, charging postage as a transaction. But in the later half of this decade, with the onset of software as a service (SaaS), high speed Internet access, cloud computing, data mining, and loads and loads of raw EDI data, the industry woke up to an epiphany and began opening the envelopes. They quickly realized that the supply chain information on hand, properly sorted and with real-time value, is worth more to the business, to the supply chain partners, to the industry, and the financial and economic community, then the postage that they have been collecting as their revenue model. As a matter of fact, rather than just sending transactions between trading partners as if they were made of paper, these networks have the ability to give visibility and transparency to multiple layers of the supply chain in a real time environment. Isn’t that meta-just-in-time (MJIT) manufacturing? Read More... | |||||
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