What are the most disruptive elements to supply chain effectiveness? With up to 80% of supply chain tied to external forces, it is external trading partners’ activities that often leave you highly exposed.
In order to meld your partner’s activities into your supply chain management practices, a hosted trading partner management platform may be the quickest answer. Of course, this doesn’t apply if all of your processes are synchronized and you have full visibility and control. But I know very few to whom that statement actually applies.
If you’ve been thinking about opening up supply chain communications with your trading partners, the marketplace has broad and robust supply chain IT solutions that provide a valuable platform for securely exchanging the following key information: 
- Forecast;
- Order management;
- Inbound transportation and import/export considerations;
- Domestic distribution practices;
- Transportation to customer; and
- Performance measurement and improvement.
Linking partners in the supply chain can yield the highest level of improvement. It can also highlight the elements of the supply chain that truly need to be improved. Transparency begets understanding; understanding begets improvement. There is nothing like a comprehensive exchange among all of your trading partners (and your internal processes) to gain transparency to where the pains lie and where improvements are needed.
What makes hosted solutions, or SaaS (software-as-a-service), attractive in general is that they offer a solution set to a broad base and limit deployment headaches. They also make simultaneous application updates to a broad population, insulating the user from system upgrade risks.
In addition, SaaS is particularly attractive to the supply chain because it allows for modular deployment of ERP updates and supply chain execution systems updates with minimal risk to trading partner and product flow. When applied to data exchange with trading partners, SaaS is extremely attractive because it typically offers a flexible set of data integration standards (including web form data entry for the less sophisticated).
With the diversity of partners involved and the constantly-evolving maturity of data synchronization capabilities, we believe SaaS is a solid play for supply chain partner integration.
Tis the season to explore your hosting options. Let us know what you think about hosted solutions.
Happy Holidays!
Matt Wilkerson
Photo Credit: izik
E-mail This | Tweet This | Share on LinkedIn
Tags: saas