Absolute Global Visibility Available Now

• Would it benefit your customers and business to know exactly where your goods are at any given moment anywhere in the world?
• Would it be useful to increase your average on-time deliveries from an average of 80%-85% to 95%-99.9%?
• Are your purchase orders for configured products, private label or special orders?
• Are most of your lead times measured in months, not days?
• Does your firm, or sourcing group, average more than 6,000 line items per month?

Not all ERP or SCM solutions - even with all the other ancillary systems to support their business processes - are able to improve supply chain visibility and insure high levels of customer service.

Yes, event monitoring and reporting on the activities of suppliers and service providers is useful and must be seamlessly integrated into the larger ERP/SCM solutions. And the theory is that information is available across the entire organization so that every participant knows when tasks are or are not executed to plan. Thus, decisions can be made to proactively influence outcomes. But can they? Does theory reflect the current reality?

Despite vast sums of money spent, most enterprise systems today are still poorly integrated and thus the information is rarely synchronized. The result: information available across the business environment is rarely balanced, validated and/or audited, and is, therefore, often of only marginal use.

Another concern is not whether the supplier has failed the customer, but that the customer - after having developed or purchased what they believe is the optimum solution - appears to be still unable to proactively monitor activities and insure better deliveries from suppliers. The problem is the inability to see into and aggressively montor let alone strongly influence suppliers' compliance to plan.

To truly collaborate with and positively influence suppliers requires a solution that can easily provide absolute visibility into all aspects of the supply chain. This solution must be:

• totally integrated;
• operate in real time; and
• support automatic monitoring, reporting and prompting.

A solution must capture information in ways your suppliers and service providers are able to interact with you: web, EDI, fax and/or manually. Most importantly, the reporting it provides must be meaningful and supportive of your business plan and decision-making processes.

A fundamental mistake is to rely on your suppliers to keep you informed of events without having proactive tracking and monitoring systems in place. Assuming that a company's suppliers are "good" suppliers, why is their on-time delivery rate still only in the 80-85% range?

How can a company improve this situation?

By taking control.

Control is a direct result of being able to have visibility into suppliers' pipelines. It is the ability to see as deeply into the supply chain as possible and monitor performance against pre-established milestones. For a small company, this can mean monitoring hundreds if not thousands of simultaneous events. Larger companies will be able to monitor tens of thousands of simultaneious events across all their departments, divisions and/or companies.

Having exceptional visibility results when you:

• can capture information on performance execution that is meaningful, actionable and timely; and
• have supporting systems that can automate and effectively track communications with suppliers

Effective communication with suppliers will dramatically increases compliance. And visibility into suppliers' performance enables companies to take control of the process instead of having to rely on their suppliers.

Today, the vast majority of companies still lack adequate, bullet-proof supply chain visibility. By still being dependent on their suppliers, they have limited or no control.

Supply chain analysts predicted for the last five years that the next wave of point solutions might address this gross deficiency in both visibility and/or in control.

Is there an enterprise or broad point solution that provides the ultimate in global visibility and control capability? And is still affordable?

Yes, and Blinco Systems' 3rdwave has a solution that has proven it provides complete and comprehensive global visibility, monitoring, tracking for complex global sourcing, logistics and distribution activities and functionality.