Global Supply Chain

The next wave in global commerce will integrate and synchronize the supporting technologies, people and processes to create a comprehensive platform that responds quickly to the dynamics of the global environment whenever meaningful change occurs. Command and control over global commerce will mature as visualization, collaboration and execution competencies evolve and are tightly integrated to provide one version of the truth through multiple user-defined views. The integration of these three components enable management, operators and strategic partners to quickly view both the activity and financial impact of global supply chain events, draw the appropriate inferences from the information, collaborate with each other for optimal decisions, and implement action to resolve the issues.
1. Visualization tools provide the personalized views needed by all involved actors as to what is happening across the global supply network, ranging from event monitoring, workflow and exception-based alerting to highly sophisticated BI and Reporting tools. The more simple visualization tools provide the operator or manager insight into statuses but limited context. More sophisticated reporting and BI tools add the layers of increasing contextualization to the information with the value-add of dynamic orientation.
2. Collaboration tools built on web 2.0 structures, allow users to create teams/communities on-demand, around specific issues or projects that are contextualized by the integrated visualization components. The collaboration tools will go beyond traditional document sharing to enable virtual meetings among knowledge holders and actors that drive solutions that will optimize results across the entire supply chain.
3. Execution management refinement will continue to drive and streamline global commerce. The newer global commerce management execution tools bring together the vital components of global sourcing and distribution, global trade management, global financial management, trade compliance, global logistics, and total cost management in a tightly integrated and synchronized environment insuring full organizational control.
Today, many of these tools exist in one state or another. The visualization tools are maturing quickly with strong capabilities to view and contextualize information through sophisticated analytics, dashboards and scenario capabilities. Collaboration tools are still relatively immature, and their adoption has been limited. Execution tools while highly developed are mostly fragmented among many offerings and don’t provide one control-centric platform. In only a few cases are these three components tightly integrated and synchronized to provide the optimum value proposition.
The next wave in global commerce management will bring together these three basic components to insure many views (visualization) of one truth (standardized information) can be quickly shared among an authorized community of stakeholders (collaboration) to deliver solutions for the timely action required for optimal resolution. When visualization, collaboration and execution capabilities are tightly integrated and synchronized, organizations will achieve full command and control of their global activities and drive the promised values.