Over the years many new supply chain technologies have come from the U.S. military and government. This has included the internet, wireless, RFID, and now situational awareness technology. For the military, situational awareness is critical for command and control and to have the ability to act within the enemy’s decision-making cycle. From a logistics perspective, situational awareness technology may be better termed as operational awareness technology. Supply chain decision-makers need information and “awareness” across the full spectrum of their supply chain operations, and not just one location or region.
Situational AwarenessSome Lessons Can Only Be Learned Once! |
Operational awareness technology is not any new piece of technology, but it is the “mash-up” of various hardware, telecommunications, and applications to produce near-real-time information for better decision-making. For many logisticians, most decision-making cycles are based on quarterly reporting and at best weekly cycles. These are decisions like determining stockage levels, demand forecasting, and carrier selection rules. Historically, many of these extended decision-making cycles were based on the limitations of information technology and telecommunications. Now all of this technology can be integrated to find out what is happening along the supply chain in real-time and near-real time. The challenge now is how to prevent information overload and make information actionable to make good, timely decisions.
When I was a tactics instructor for the U.S. Army, the military had an analytical process called METT-T that walked through the steps to create a plan for military action. METT-T stands for Mission, Enemy, Terrain and weather, Troops and support available–Time available. This planning process usually took at least a couple of hours if not days to complete, and even with detail planning there were usually major gaps in information. Now, with the military use of situational awareness technology this METT-T process can be cut down to seconds. Additionally, with the use of drones, satellites, wireless, mobile computers, detection devices, and so on, situational awareness of METT-T is almost perfect. This type of operational awareness technology can now be leveraged by logistics operations. In many cases, businesses and logistics operations can use the same technology as the military to include RFID, EDI, wireless, mobile computing, business intelligence (BI) applications, and near-real-time integration of systems.
The challenge for logistics operations is to make all this operational awareness information actionable. With the military using the METT-T process, they are able to leverage situational awareness technology easily and make it actionable. Logistics operations also need to have an effective analytical process to achieve true operational awareness. Many businesses and logistics operations have created dashboards, balanced scorecards, metrics, alerts and so on in attempts to make all this information actionable. The question is whether companies will really act on this information or are all these dashboards and alerts just presenting information that is never acted on by decision-makers. If this operational awareness information is not acted on by decision-makers, the technology becomes just a burden and a drain on profits. I have seen many cases, where businesses have set up “operational awareness” information systems that takes several IT persons to maintain, and then the decision-makers do not use the system.
In war, if a military force does not use a METT-T type analytical process that is better and faster than the enemy, the military force will soon be defeated. In business and logistics operations, operational awareness is just as important where actionable information needs to be better and faster than the competition.
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Tags: logistics, Mash-ups, Operational Awareness