|
Complexity And Visibility Hampering High-Tech Supply Chains
By Mike Sachoff
Staff Writer
Article Date: 2009-01-30
The increasing numbers of products, suppliers, channels and geographies, along with a lack of real-time visibility, are hampering high-tech manufacturers supply chains and hurting their bottom lines, according to a new Infosys/Microsoft survey.
The Infosys/Microsoft "High-Tech Manufacturing Supply Chain Survey 2009," conducted by Washington, D.C.-based KRC Research among high-tech manufacturing firms in Germany, Japan and the United States, found half of business decision-makers, reported increasing complexity in their supply chains.
In addition, 65 percent reported experiencing a supply chain disruption, and said it took hours or longer from the time of disruption to when supply chain systems reported the incident.
"The economy may be down, but the number of products, suppliers and geographies that high-tech manufacturers have to manage has gone way up," said Tyler Bryson, general manager of U.S. Manufacturing and Resources Sector at Microsoft Corp.
"This complexity has made it difficult for firms to discover disruptions and act quickly, and this is becoming an increasingly serious industry issue. In fact, research has shown that supply chain disruptions can negatively impact income and return on sales by more than 100 percent for two years or more after an incident occurs," according to Supply & Demand Chain Executive.
Complexity may be one of the reasons for the lag time between supply chain disruptions and their reporting within firms' supply chain systems. Another factor could be overall "freshness" of data updated in these systems, as half of those surveyed reported the data is not updated in real time (or near-real time), and more than a third reported that 50 percent of their data or more is not automatically captured from suppliers, partners and customers.
"Complexity of products, suppliers and geographies is one issue, but supply chain professionals often have poor visibility across the enterprise and its trading partners and lack the tools necessary to make informed decisions and manage performance globally," said Sanjay Jalona, vice president and U.S. head of manufacturing at Infosys Technologies.
"Data that's still captured manually or is scattered across multiple systems must be gathered together and manipulated in order to gain real, actionable insight that these professionals can act upon quickly."
Nearly a third of those surveyed reported their supply chain professionals spend 25 percent of their time finding and re-working supply chain data to get it to the required level of granularity and format.
Some potential reasons for this lack of visibility include:
Lack of good industry standards (19 percent)
Inflexible enterprise resource planning (ERP) system (17 percent)
Too many vendors or suppliers with different systems (15 percent)
Not enough collaboration tools (9 percent)
Those surveyed predict increased use of a number of collaboration tools by 2010, including:
Webconferencing (60 percent)
Instant messaging internally (54 percent)
Instant messaging with external supply chain partners (54 percent)
Integrated voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) with messaging systems (51 percent)
Business intelligence reporting and analytics (46 percent)
"Due to the critical need to communicate in real time along the supply chain, the industry will begin to adopt more collaboration tools such as instant messaging, social networking, VoIP and more," said Drew Gude, U.S. high-tech and electronics industry solutions director at Microsoft.
"However, the key will be managing these tools in a secure way while still allowing real-time collaboration to occur among trading partners and across geographies."
About the Author:
Mike is a staff writer for WebProNews. Visit WebProNews for the latest ebusiness news.
|
|
