Supply Chain Visibility Nirvana
The term supply chain visibility is a broad term and changes a little bit every year as we get new technology to get more visibility. I have heard DoD “war stories” from 20-30 years ago where they would assign a Lt. Colonel to daily track a high-value electronics component such as a satellite dish from the U.S. to Japan.
The last couple of years, a lot of supply chain vendors are focused on providing inbound supply chain visibility with services and software to match purchase orders, advance ship notices (ASN), and vendor invoices. SterlingCommerce just announced an On-Demand Supply Chain Visibility tool that provides this visibility if all your vendors use SterlingCommerce’s Value Added Network (VAN) or an interconnecting VAN. This sound expensive as everyone in the supply chain has to pay the VAN transaction fees for the inbound supplier (usually a large retailer) to get the visibility. At the same time this could be a good and quick solution compared to setting up your own EDI network and buying / developing your own supply chain visibility software.
Tags: EDI, supply chain, visibility