Visibility & Event Management

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Visibility and Event Management

Understanding the critical events that drive supply chain execution efficiency, monitoring exceptions with clear visibility throughout the network, and preventing or responding efficiently to adverse situations

Description

Do you have the real time information necessary to immediately resolve problems in your supply and demand networks? When an adverse situation occurs, how confident are you that the right people are informed in a timely manner? Does your company understand the ramifications of upstream and downstream snafus on your customers’ perceptions? Would it be valuable to be able to prevent these problems from happening in the first place?

Typical ERP and advanced planning applications provide little understanding of real-time operations in the supply chain, such as localized demand spikes, power outages at remote facilities, manufacturing equipment malfunctions, and shipment delays. But these execution-level incidents—whether predictable or not—are often the difference between winning and losing customer business. How well your company manages these situations will strongly impact your long-term success.

Enterprise visibility—or supply chain event management (SCEM)—is a set of processes, protocols, and tools that enable intelligent, exception-based management of tactical supply chain operations. These solutions create transparency in your supply chain and promote the seamless linkage of planning and execution processes across enterprises. They provide critical information to your staff on the discrete events and trends in your network that affect your ability to serve customers. It’s not enough to be concerned with what happens inside your own company every day. The ripple effect makes problems in your network exponentially harder to solve the longer it takes to become aware of them.

Problems Solved

We understand the dilemmas you face. Distribution facilities are not always aware of production line problems at your manufacturing facilities. Warehouse staff find out about late shipments only when they don’t show up. Different companies in your network respond in conflicting ways to the same event. All of these problems are due to lack of visibility across the network and lack of logical processes to deal with adverse events. And who catches the flak over these problems, for which no one wants to take responsibility?

Cojent Solutions has the knowledge and experience to help you create a powerful offense to deal with these problems. Together we can create the visibility necessary to detect potential disruptions, respond immediately, and maintain extraordinarily high levels of customer performance. The potential impacts to your bottom line are wide ranging, and include:

Decreasing excess inventory by more efficiently managing distribution of product across the network;
Improving delivery performance by enabling re-routing or product substitution in case of supply disruptions;
Reducing cash-to-cash cycle times by converging payables and receivables flows;
Using RFID technology to instantly find and track individual SKUs and orders throughout the network;
Clarifying demand signals from disparate sources via local “sense and respond” capability; and
Anticipating late deliveries and allocating alternate sources to fulfill orders.

Specific Offerings

Cojent Solutions has the tools you need to implement robust visibility throughout your enterprise or your entire network. Using a logical flow of activities, we help you prioritize which areas need better visibility—and which do not. You’ll be able to “filter through the noise” to uncover the truly important events that drive customer profitability. In three manageable phases, we can help your company manage exceptions at world-class level.

The first stage consists of basic functionality such as carrier shipment tracking, production line status, and point-of-sale information. These are core components of many event management tools. But in truth these are ticket-to-entry capabilities. At Cojent Solutions, we believe there are far more advantages to be had. We view SCEM as a continual cycle of sensing, responding, and learning from the unexpected. The goal is to incrementally reduce the number of exceptions that occur. The Cojent difference is our focus on adding intelligence to visibility.

In the intermediate phase, your company will be able to control responses to unexpected events, not simply be aware of them. Receiving an alert doesn’t do much good if you can’t react quickly to correct the underlying problem. This means having processes in place to understand the nature and severity of the situation, share information with appropriate people, and allocate resources to solve the problem.

Ideally, a coordinated response with your trading partners can increase efficiency even more. This can prevent conflicting responses to the same event. For example, in the event of a port workers’ strike, a customer may anticipate that shipments will be delayed and order replacement product from another source. However, at the same time you are trying to extract product out of nearby inventory to fulfill the original order. Problems like this can be avoided by having coordinated processes in place to ensure your customer that you can maintain delivery performance.

Responding quickly to exceptions may give you a slight edge; understanding why they happen—and preventing recurrence—will give you a potent strategic advantage. Companies in the advanced phase of SCEM have capability to avoid these disruptions in the first place. Analyzing event patterns and trends can lead to the ability to preempt many exceptions. This advanced state can be realized by creating joint processes and protocols with your supply chain partners to detect, respond to, and learn from exceptions.

Events may be unexpected when they occur, but almost every one can be predicted in advance at some level of confidence. This predictability can be the foundation of a set of contingency plans implemented prior to the unexpected events. For example, consider the difference between 1) a software tool that notifies you of a late shipment, and 2) a system of processes and information flows that allow you to execute an alternative shipment to replace a shipment that is expected to be late. Your internal correction will be transparent to your customer, rather than being a damaging customer service issue.

Contribution to Corporate Goals

Competitive pressures are no doubt driving you to continually improve your supply chain performance. You need more transparency in global operations. You need to coordinate exception response with your supply chain partners. You need to maximize flexibility in responding to changing customer demand. And all this while relentlessly purging costs and inefficiency out of your network. By deeply understanding your supply and demand chains, Cojent Solutions can help your company use event management to successfully meet these corporate goals.