Sustainable competitive advantage
Speed of connection and community member management will be critical requirements and the ability to resolve the differences in reference and identification, essential
If we accept that the central nervous system orchestrates and manages all of the necessary operations in the human body, we need a counterpart for a collaborative supply chain community. In order to do this what features would such a mechanism need?
In essence it would need to exhibit a high degree of ‘connectivity’, so that it could accept or transfer data from any point in the network. It should recognise that the network may extend from raw material through to final delivery, including the related service parts, return and repair cycles. The community administration mechanisms should be capable of accommodating any number of trading partners; at whatever tier level they may be participating.
It should support and monitor the activities and operations of any number of specific functional applications such as manufacturing, warehousing and transportation across the whole community. As such it needs to be ‘process agnostic’, as the purpose should be to support a variety of existing work flows, rather than enforce conformance to one.
It should also provide mechanisms to resolve differences in nomenclature and frame taxonomies, so as to enable the transparent identification of products and components as they pass across the network.
The assignment of access rights and related attributes for new community members should be a swift process, which does not interfere with existing operations. It should also support the development of many communities simultaneously, as well as the growth of sub-communities within existing ones.
Security should be comprehensive, but not ‘intrusive’, at all levels of the community operations. It should also be possible to introduce new applications either alongside, or as replacements for, any existing ones. Event management mechanisms should be embedded within the ‘infrastructure’ of the network and be capable of instantaneous reconfiguration from any point.
Finally, it would make sense to provide this collaborative ‘nervous system’ as a network service via the Internet, rather than as a single instance in one organisation. This is because trading partners usually participate in many communities rather than just one.
But what is it that will initiate the ‘collaboration’ between community members?
As previously stated, issues such as trust become paramount. Almost all companies will not allow ad-hoc instructions or queries to impact their information systems. If they have spent considerable periods of time and money fine-tuning their IT infrastructure, a rogue instruction could have immense impact.
As a result, human intervention is necessary at many points where data is passed between corporate boundaries. The intolerance of EDI (electronic data interchange) transfers, only serve to illustrate how delicate information exchanges can be. However, with the advent of XML, the precision and control of data interchange improves dramatically.