Real-Time Visibility & The Competitive Enterprise

In a competitive field, delays of any kind along the supply chain, in the sales cycle, and even in the back office can be fatal to a customer relationship — not to mention your margins. To get ahead, you need to see ahead, and troubleshoot problems before they happen.

Not long ago at all, business visibility was a much greater challenge — to the degree that it was even possible at all. Decision makers often relied on outdated data, the result of batch processed information and other IT infrastructure constraints. In other instances there might have been too much data and not enough time to collate the most salient information. Too often, the true status of the enterprise was an educated guess and it was difficult to ascertain the validity of a piece of given information.

Now, IT systems provide a decisive alternative. There are many reasons to implement an extended ERP system and chief among them is to increase your organizational visibility. To be proactive, to get the right products to the right place at the right time, to be as responsive as possible to customers while containing costs and maximizing profits — all begin with the visibility available via ERP systems.

Supply Chain — Heart of the Extended Enterprise
The most important area in which you want as clear a picture as possible is in your supply chain. As your business grows — expanding into new markets, adding new products, opening new productions facilities — your supply chain becomes more complex. With many different demand streams to account for and multiple production choices, you can lose focus on how to fulfill customer orders most cost-effectively. This includes even the most basic things such as the best place in your operation to send the order and where the best places are to get the materials and resources you need.

You need a solution that helps you get a complete picture of your demand so you can figure out the best way to have it produced.

Next when you are ready to produce that order in your factory, you need to know the up-to-the-minute status of your plant floor, what exceptions are being reported, and what the results will be of the various decisions you are considering. You also need to be proactive in solving problems and providing answers and products to your customers.

All of this depends on powerful Order Management, Supply Chain Planning, and Factory Planning software and — most critically — running on a real-time database. Traditional batch processing will fail you here. Things are moving much too fast in your business and in the businesses of your partners and suppliers. To be able to make intelligent assessments you need to know what is going on in your enterprise in real time.

Shop Floor Data Collection — Staying on Top of The Action
On the shop floor, a number of activities take place that have an impact on your supply chain, planning, and decision-making. You do not want to wait until the end of a shift to know what has happened, you need to record the activity as it takes place in order to reflect the shop floor's reality back into your optimization models so that you are always planning with current information.

Information can be gathered in myriad ways — including radio frequency identification (RFID), radio frequency (RF) and hardwired terminals, laser and thermal barcode printers, fixed mount barcode readers, relays, reader boards and other serial or Ethernet devices — and should interface in real time back into your ERP system.

Manufacturers that use shop floor data collection realize a wide range of benefits including increased productivity, reduced errors, slashed inventory costs, and improved customer satisfaction.

Enterprise-Wide Visibility — Everybody Gets It
While supply chain visibility is a sort of 'holy grail' for manufacturing enterprises, there are many other areas of an organization that benefit from real-time information and the kinds of tools that report on it. Everyone from Sales to Expediters and Purchasers to AP and AR clerks make decisions every day, throughout the day, that are furthered by their visibility from ERP systems. Almost any operational activity benefits from tools that go into the colossal mass of information generated within your company and report back what is happening at critical locations and what options you have to act upon that information.

For instance, a planner needs to know about delivery problems, MPS and MRP exceptions, sales orders without supply, and shortages in production. A manufacturing manager will want the same type of opportunities in regard to areas such as engineering changes, material scrap, shortages in production, and work orders to be released. A GM may want to know some of the same things in addition to any issues in sales and service.

A good system will allow all these workers to see all pending issues on a screen, note which areas require urgent attention, and be able to point and click over to where they can resolve the issues. Moreover, these activities often have repercussions on the planning system and so you need these tools to flex with your business processes and work in concert within the ERP framework to maximize your effectiveness.

Business Intelligence — Cutting Edge Decision-Making
The current standards in Business Intelligence applications also serve to leverage voluminous data into actionable information at a much higher level than before. In order to decrease decision making cycle times and accuracy, increase organizational responsiveness, and identify and track key performance indicators, you need to deploy Business Intelligence software that enables you to create the reports and perform the multidimensional analysis you need to fulfill your promises whether to customers or board members.

As business moves at an ever-faster pace with more complex, global operations, greater product proliferation, and decreasing margins, Business Intelligence is the tool that will keep your managers up to speed and in the know.

Document Management
An interesting area of Business Intelligence is document management. While not as "glamorous" as some of the reporting capabilities of other intelligence software, the ability to publish and retrieve data at operational locations, for shipment purposes, or in customer service situations can have a sizable impact on your performance and how it is perceived. How often does it happen that critical information is not at the fingertips of your executives, sales representatives, customer service personnel, call center staff, customers, and partners? When your staff makes faster, more informed business decisions, you are more competitive.

I Can See For Miles
Visibility is not a big concept, but it has very big consequences. Now that enterprise tools exist that give you visibility into your business much faster than was ever possible — or that give you more penetrating visibility than was possible at all — you almost certainly should assess your opportunities. You can discover potential issues before they become problems, kill the lag time between when you receive information and when it becomes bad, and rapidly defuse the problems that do occur.

When you put the right information at the right place at the right time for your workers, the gains you make in strategic, operational, and tactical visibility will translate into customer satisfaction and bottom line numbers that have always been and always will be especially visible — in your general ledger.