Collaboration

Collaboration…a basic Supply Chain Function

Posted in Blinco Systems News, Collaboration on October 13th, 2010 by Edward Blinick – Be the first to comment

Last week my reading brought me to this article “Managing The Basic Supply Chain Functions“ .  In the article Professor Paul Dittman from the University of Tennessee outlines what he considers are the Five Pillars of Supply Chain Excellence:

  1. Talent is the first of the five pillars driving supply chain excellence. If you don’t have the right people in place, you can’t build an appropriate strategy – and you certainly can’t execute it. Finding talent for supply chain positions has unique challenges due in large part to the cross-functional and cross-company pressures supply chain executives face today.
  2. Technology is always critical, but the real key is making sure you choose the right supply chain technology and successfully implement it. Improperly understood or implemented technology can cause severe damage rather than improvement. You must be careful in how you select and apply the latest supply chain technologies, especially given the extremely complex nature of today’s global supply chains.
  3. Internal collaboration means that each function in your firm plays a critical role in building a successful supply chain. Effective internal collaboration will help you develop a clear vision for how all the functions can work together to achieve supply chain excellence. The New Supply Chain Agenda includes a self-assessment worksheet you can complete to honestly evaluate your process for aligning the demand and supply sides of the firm.
  4. External collaboration focuses on how your company can achieve breakthrough results by collaborating externally with both your suppliers and your customers. Best practices for collaboration exist and are being applied by more and more firms.
  5. Managing supply chain change is the last but equally critical pillar of a supply chain excellence strategy. If you don’t execute change successfully, everything else is for naught. You need to learn how to increase your chances of success on the path to supply chain excellence. Because of their cross-functional, cross-company nature, supply chain projects are more difficult to implement than those in other functional areas.

While it can be argued that five other components could be considered equally important, these five points are undoubtedly critical to achieving Supply Chain excellence.

What I find particularly interesting is that Dittman puts collaboration as 2 of the 5 major pillars of excellence.  Why does Dittman rank collaboration so highly?

I would argue it is because collaboration is the way work gets done - whether internal or external.  All actors in the supply chain collaborate whether they are conscious of the act or not.  Collaboration takes place at the planning, execution and management levels.  Collaboration is cross-functional and takes place among multiple parties.  Collaboration is both formal and informal.  Collaboration supports both tactical and strategic activity.

Furthermore, I would argue that because collaboration is so basic to doing work, an organization cannot excel at managing change (point 5) if the organization does not have superior collaboration capabilities and infrastructure.

Today, there are different technologies that go to support collaboration.  Obviously some tools are better than others in supporting the flow of information inside  and among organizations  .  However, the effectiveness of a collaboration tool is measured by its uptake in the organization.  In order to be accepted and broadly used by all levels of the user community it must be simple to use and organic to the work process.  It must be designed to facilitate not just the formal requirements of early generation collaborative tools such as document sharing and structured interaction but it must have the added attribute of being extremely flexible and supportive of rapid interaction for common work purpose.

Everyone is impacted by social media like You Tube, Facebook, Twitter, Texting and Instant Messaging.  These social media applications are successful because they are a natural extension to the way people interact and collaborate in their daily lives.  In order for collaboration tools to be successful in the organization they must be a natural extension to the way people work and interact in their business environment.

e-Collaboration – Powerful Supply Chain tool?

Posted in Collaboration, Global Commerce Control, Supply Chain Execution Convergence on September 30th, 2010 by Edward Blinick – Be the first to comment
I recently came across two fascinating research papers on e-Collaboration and its value.

http://www.eurojournals.com/ejsr_34_3_04.pdf
http://www.ccsenet.org/journal/index.php/ibr/article/viewFile/807/796

For supply chain professional’s e-collaboration has exceptional potential.  However, there are 2 major design issues that must be overcome in order to have collaboration tools broadly accepted within an organization.  The collaboration tools must be highly user centric and they must integrate into the user’s everyday workflow.  Quite a lot has been written over the past several years on the value that collaboration brings to the business world, yet the uptake by business has been limited.

In order to be introduced into an organization, the collaboration tool must meet a high level of security that fully mitigates the risk in terms of uptime, susceptibility to hacking, and controlled access to sensitive information.  However, in order to be accepted into the organization the collaboration tool must also meet the minimum usability criteria of the user community.  It is at this level that many collaboration projects fail.  Simply stated the collaboration tools are too limited in their design for ease of use (for the user requirement) and to limited in their scope of purpose.

Current collaboration applications focus on the ability of the tools to provide value to the organization in terms of knowledge management, project management, and document sharing.  The focus is on providing a tool where people of like interests can organize themselves in communities around specific goals to achieve a common end.  While all this is important, its uptake in the organization still requires user buy-in.  In much of the literature published about the collaboration applications there is strong reference to how to manage the implementation of the collaboration tool and project.

To me, having to manage the implementation and acceptance of a collaboration project is counter-intuitive.  By definition, the collaboration tools designed for business should have the same ease of acceptance as the social networking tools.  The user community, managers and operators, should want to use collaboration tools as a normal extension of their work flow.  The implementation of the collaboration tools should be driven by the user community and not by organizational fiat.

In order to achieve the user acceptance and popularity of social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, the collaboration tools must be easy to set up, dead simple to use, and intuitively support the user in the daily routines of their business day.   This means all forms of interpersonal communication and collaboration.  If these “acceptance” criteria are met the uptake in the organization will be viral – just the way it is in the social world.

The challenge of most collaboration software for enterprise, is that the user WORKs on one enterprise system but COLLABORATEs  on another (or multiple).

The global supply chain is exceptionally complex.  With more organizations sourcing and distributing globally the need to be able to seamlessly share information and communicate quickly, across multiple organizational boundaries (internal and external), in real time, about supply and demand issues is critical to managing and achieving corporate business objectives.  Over the next several months, Blinco Systems will be launching the Collaboration Station, its collaborative tool that seamlessly integrates to its 3rdwave GCM, global commerce management, solution.

The real differentiator for the Collaboration Station is that it  is designed to support the user in their daily “real work” through interactive “collaboration and communication”.   Facebook / twitter are raging successes because the goal of their user is social collaboration.  In the enterprise, the goal of the user is completing work activities effectively and efficiently.  For an enterprise collaboration tool to succeed its objective must be to simplify the user work experience and improve business results.  The goal of enterprise collaboration is to facilitate user work.

The Collaboration Station is  designed with the supply chain user in mind.  Its primary focus is on providing intuitive collaboration and communication for problem solving, small issue resolution, and knowledge sharing as an integrated component of a greater supply chain solution.    The Collaboration Station provides for project management, document sharing, and knowledge management that other collaboration software applications deliver, but in a more fluid and dynamic environment that reflects typical user behavior.

Follow us on Facebook for more information on the roll-out and availability of the Collaboration Station.