Instant availability of information via wireless networks creates infinite opportunities. Customers can at any time use Internet services via their mobile smartphones to look up and compare information about pricing and availability of products. What does this new competitive situation mean to you and your supply chain?
In total contrast to my personal values on marital relationships, I believe “loose coupling” quite often is the right design for enterprise application integration. Whereas humans have emotional and existential needs to function well, systems are happy with a well-defined contract of communication and does not care who is on the other end. It would make no difference if it was exchanged, as long as it lived up to the mutual contract. No need for life-long commitments here.
Recently I praised how we can gain quick benefits from more simplistic approaches for supply chain collaboration (here) But in high-volume environments we do need solid and message-based system integration based on a shared standard for the data content. Check out this videocast about integrating Advance Ship Notices on the Supply Chain Television Channel (you can sign up for free). It is from September and includes a really good discussion about ASN usage and critical success factors for truly streamlined process automation.
This week I was somewhat enlightened to better understand when the benefits of multi-tenant cloud computing really makes a difference in supply chain. It can be summarized in two words: Collaboration and, even more important, Simplicity. In this particular case it was embodied by one of our recently acquired software solutions – iSupply.
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