Connect the Dots 1
Want to strike fear into a supply chain planner’s heart? Just say those three magic words: “Where’s my order?”
It’s a surprisingly difficult question to answer. It’s especially difficult in the fashion business with its long, complicated supply chain. So we teamed up with some of our fashion customers to build a solution.
Here’s the nub of the issue: what you do for manufacturing efficiency is the opposite of what you need for good customer service. To make manufacturing more efficient, you should aggregate demand – take all the orders coming in and bunch them together. Then manufacture the product in batches that are sized to match your capacity.
When you batch orders together, however, you lose sight of individual orders. You get efficiency at the expense of visibility. When a customer calls, you can’t tell how much has been promised to them and how much has been committed to others. The challenge is even greater if your manufacturing process has multiple stages. You can see the big batch but you can’t see the big picture.
Our solution is to put virtual tags on the elements of each order. Like bar codes, the tags are visible to the rest of the system. We then link the tags from a given order together.
Even if the tags (and their associated line items) are separated into multiple batches, we can quickly assemble the links to see the original order. It’s like the children’s game of connect-the-dots. What appears to be a random set of dots suddenly becomes a recognizable picture as you draw the lines from dot to dot.
In our case, the links are logical rather than hard-coded. This means that you can change the links in real time if the order changes. You can do more what-if analysis and rapidly see the ripple effects of a changing order.
The result? You can get – perhaps for the first time ever – a high degree of manufacturing efficiency coupled with a high degree of visibility and customer service. We call it Supply Chain Orders and we designed it to work with the complex, fluid supply chains typical of the fashion industry. In other words, we designed a solution for the most difficult instance of the problem. It should work equally well in any other industry that has complicated supply chains. It’s another example of how we can focus on one industry but bring important benefits to multiple industries.
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