Let’s revisit the eternal issue of “my ASN is missing”: If an ASN is not transmitted or received in time we face not only the risk that the receiving floor gets congested while the staff chase for information, but also more serious downstream impact as our squeezed lead times amplifies the effects of information not being available in time. Failed cross-docks, backorder situations, and ultimately inability to meet customer promises are some examples.

I would argue that the principles used in an iPhone wake-up app can actually help us avoid these situations! Care to know how?

Maybe you have heard of or even use the iPhone wake-up app that registers your sleep cycle and wakes you up when you’re in a light sleeping phase? By measuring your sleeping activity it knows what state you are in and picks a good moment for firing off the alarm. It makes you face the day more refreshed without really knowing why.

How does this relate to supply chain, you might wonder?

The trigger of the alarm is both an event and a non-event. On the surface nothing really happened (you were sleeping and about to wake up). But underneath, the app had measured and recorded knowledge about your behavior while sleeping and could proactively detect that it was time for you to get started and that it should tell you “wakey-wakey”.

In a supply chain context we certainly want to use a similar proactive detective to identify underlying mechanisms to find the events and non-events to alert on. With the additional complexity that we often need to look across many interrelated processes and systems to know when to fire the alarm.

In the “ASN is missing” example we need to look at the potential systems involved in getting information about a shipment to your warehouse operation. In a traditional WMS solution we might capture it only when the shipment arrives, and then as an action code for “delayed shipment”. Yes, that is too late…

With integrated event management you will be able to configure agents to detect this as a ‘non-event’ situation:

• Set up an agent that looks at the inbox in the EDI Integration / Middleware system. If the supplier fails to comply with notification deadlines (based on a time-out condition), then check the PO status in the ERP and notify the supplier plus log the non-compliance as an error event. If the situation remains, you can escalate and log a new, more serious, error event.

By doing this, you can turn a ‘non-event’ into measurable data and generate both proactive action that will help remediate the short term effect, as well as great opportunity to track performance so corrective action can be applied to the process.

So by systematic event monitoring we form a pattern to learn from, just like the wake-up app does!

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