U. S. Army Video on Benefits of ERP Implementation
SupplyChainer has a great video link on ERP in the U.S. Army. Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) has traditionally been for manufacturers, but with the trend toward ERP II all large organizations are looking to ERP to solve their data synchronization challenges across the organization.
I am seeing three distinct ways that organizations are looking to address data synchronization within their organization and with their suppliers and customers. One is go the ERP route that the U. S. Army is going at the macro level. The other way is to use a managed file transfer solution or value added network (VAN) to exchange information between organizations and systems. Another emerging supply chain technology is RFID tags where the status of the products and shipments can actually be stored on the RFID tag as it travels with the product. Then systems could poll the RFID interrogation network to get the data and process it for the system’s unique needs. No need for systems to exchange data with each other.