Here are summaries of the topics covered, and each column, in Word:

The Successful Initial Implementation or Upgrade

THERE IS A DIFFERENCE BETWEEN INFORMATION, AND INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY. Peter Drucker is the one who said that, in a Delphi conference a few years ago, and it is a valid point. You can buy technology, but you must generate information.

This column contains some thoughts from a successful "go-live", which included hand-written conversions from a non-MultiValue database, and user testing and piloting. Many of these concepts hold true for major upgrades on existing systems, as well.

Supply Chain Management and World-Class Performance Measurement

The Supply Chain is a complex, integrated web of relationships among suppliers, distributors, and customers that a company relies on, to make and sell their products. Many of these relationships are difficult to measure or assess in terms of usefulness, quality of performance or value added. The Supply Chain should be viewed in terms of coordination with the Enterprise Resources Planning (ERP) environment.

To modify, or not to modify

(apologies to Hamlet). It’s a question many customers face, and the answer is – it depends.

If the customer has an older legacy system, and new business issues arise, such as Value Chain, B2B integration with business partners, or a need for enhanced management reporting, do you modify, live with it, or buy something else? Will "something else" bring its own set of problems?

This article identifies some key metrics that can be used to help measure performance in managing the Supply Chain, in an ERP environment.

ERP, Supply Chain, and Portals

Ideally, a supply chain portal can be used to connect all tiers of a Value Chain, regardless of an organization's size, location or IT environment.

Suppliers could view demand, inventory and performance metrics.  Customers could view Available-to-Promise, Open Sales Orders and Order History, inquire on Open AR’s, and view Configurations, and enter Quotations.  Engineers could communicate on projects, viewing the product structure for their own supplied parts, or the entire structure, based on access granted.

Portals can potentially provide a mechanism, not only to view information, but also to monitor supply chain performance. These metrics can then, in turn, be analyzed by business intelligence capabilities, either supplied along with the portal, or 3rd party. Companies should seek better interaction with partners, to improve fulfillment performance across the chain.

You Can Add Value, NOW

In this period of economic contraction, companies are losing faith in their own IT initiatives, which they’d begun in order to remove operating inefficiencies, improve Value Chain communication, or integrate their own multiple platforms. Many of these carried a high price tag, and a long horizon, and are now vulnerable to either delay or de-funding.

I’d like to focus on a few topics which, while always relevant to improved margins, are more important in this age of Value Chain velocity, and rapid change notifications, thanks to B2B and XML initiatives speeding up requirements adjustments.


Supplier Relationship Management (SRM)

Supplier Relationship Management (SRM) defines a company’s efforts to assemble a comprehensive solution, to enable the use of existing information about the supply base and procurement history, in order to effectively respond to customer demand.  This involves consolidating and classifying data to provide an understanding of supplier relationships, including on-time delivery, quality of product delivered, and costs.