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About Logistical Product Solutions Industry Solutions White Papers |
What is SCAN's value proposition? What about a small to mid-sized manufacturer that can't afford an ERP scale implementation? What do you really mean by 'business model'? Why is having a multi-company business model (or any business model) so important? Who builds the supply chain business model? To what extent do trading partners have to have their internal operations modeled? How does one get started? Can it support other events besides customer orders? For example, sharing a sales forecast with a trading partner. Is this type of software 'bolted on' to an MRP or does it replace MRP? What is the main problem holding back the implementation of Internet supply chains?
SCAN is the only Internet supply chain software designed for small to medium size companies: - As native Internet software components with a very focused mission, it is relatively inexpensive compared to complex, monolithic client-server products such as ERP - The functionality is focused. The model building is visual and flexible. The planner interface is simple and intuitive. As a result, the implementation cycle time is very fast and the consulting costs are significantly lower than ERP, pre-Internet supply chain and advanced planning packages. - We advocate phased deployment. Cherry pick a product family or production line where the inability of current systems to communicate rapidly has lead to inventory and/or order fulfillment issues. Implement the technology in this one corner of your business operation first, to master the technology and to reap a fast ROI. Once the approach is validated, continue to roll it out in stages, starting with the highest return situations - the 'low hanging fruit'. Our business model defines the companies that participate in the supply chain and the relations between them - such as who supplies what types of material to whom. It also defines for each product family the standard flow of material across all the significant stages of manufacturing and distribution. For each stage, we identify who owns the inventory asset, who has planning responsibility and where the material is located. All manufacturing packages are models of a business operation. But some are so terribly fragmented among tens and hundreds of master files that no one can understand the overall representation. And these awfully complex configurations often overlook key information - like asset ownership - that are essential to supply chains. The business model is vital because it is the foundation upon which event-driven activity takes place. As planners take actions, the business model controls the direction and the ripple effect of those actions. Without a multi-company representation, real-time collaboration among trading partners is impossible - you are forced to settle for periodic transmissions and updates between disparate systems - too rigid and too slow for today's competitive environment. Initially, the sponsoring company takes the lead in building the business model. They will likely get into the internals of their own business operation. By contrast, the modeling of their supply chain partners is limited to what has immediate functional value. For example, a customer's retail or distribution warehouse inventory can be monitored for reorder point violations. When an event such as a POS or shipment transaction lowers inventory below reorder point a replenishment demand can be communicated back to the sponsoring company. On the supplier side, no modeling is required up front. You basically want to communicate real-time material requirements to the supplier. This can take the form of To Do Lists, formatted email or even EDI. The aim is to speed up the flow of information to them which is in everyone's best interest. Customers and suppliers may later decide to implement the software for their own operational planning. They would then model their own internal manufacturing and distribution proces, either on their own or on a hosted server. Their server would communicate with the original server via robust, secure Internet messaging. Think of our technology as having two layers: a business object model and an application layer that rides on top of the model:
- Multi-company forecasting, where a forecast is exploded across multiple tiers of a supply chain, with opportunities to invoke rules and exceptions at every tier - Collaborative product development - Outsourcing within the same system - Cash flows for joint ventures. Currently, we have built one key application: B2B-MRP™, which explodes dependent demand across the model, nets demand against supplies at every stage and provides real-time, collaborative material planning.
But this would severely constrain its potential. Traditional MPS and MRP are batch jobs that usually run overnight because they require locked transaction files and because of their impact on CPU performance. SCAN wants to be a real-time, event driven planning environment. To fulfill its value proposition, SCAN needs to replace traditional batch based, single company MPS and MRP with B2B-MRP™.
The constraint on the transformation of the B2B trading hubs into Internet supply chains is the absense of a fully developed, multi-company business object model. Virtual inventory requires a multi-company business object model. Material planning across multiple companies cannot be done by sending EDI-like messages between batch systems that run internally to each company in a supply chain. One demand signal in such a configuration can take days to travel the supply chain. The whole system wants to run on a hosted server environment. |
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