In a world where things are getting smaller, why are big IT projects still getting approved?

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We first designed VisibleLogistics for sell-side order management, where a 'seller' would use it to track orders that he ships to his customers. However, when we showed an early version to someone she asked if she could enter a 'purchase order', where she would be the buyer, so she could track products she has ordered from her suppliers.

This question made us realise that our intended simplification of designing for sellers was really just an unnecessary restriction. VisibleLogistics now lets you enter orders acting as any one of buyer, carrier or seller, so you have more flexibility in what you use the system for.

The best part of all this, of course, is that we were about to start using VisibleLogistics ourselves to track things that our development team buys: wine and new computers. This turns out to be really useful in our organisation, because we do not have support staff who handle tasks like buying stuff, so members of the team deal with suppliers directly. This can sometimes be a pain, when a supplier telephones about an order and the person who answers the call does not know anything about it.

Now, with our company VisibleLogistics account, order status notifications are sent to an internal e-mail list, so everyone knows what is on order. Also, if a supplier telephones, it is easy to go to the VisibleLogistics dashboard and find the order in the list of open orders. Even better, when we add a telephone message as a comment on an order, the colleague whose order it is stays in the loop.

Blue Sky Logistics just posted an article about The Long Tail of Supply Chain IT Projects, which points out how The Long Tail applies to supply chain IT projects:

I think the long tail theory can be applied to IT projects, specifically in the area of supply chain collaboration. Traditional supply chain IT spending has gone to large, monolithic software packages that handle an entire functional area of the business: warehouse management, ERP, purchasing […]

With the growth of on-demand applications, faster and more dynamic software development, and XML standards, a company can test the waters with smaller projects and smaller risk[…] With a hosted application, there is much less upfront spending which lowers a big traditional risk of trying to make these kinds of changes.

This actually describes the rationale behind VisibleLogistics pretty well - simple low-cost hosted on-line supply chain collaboration software. The long tail is the large number of small supply chain partners who cannot individually justify or achieve expensive integration with traditional supply chain software, but who collectively represent a huge opportunity for improved collaboration.