(and why they are so important!)
Time to broaden your supply chain internationally? You won't be alone. Today's highly competitive global marketplace demands, at a minimum, some level of active involvement or peripheral participation in foreign markets due to rapidly changing market conditions, aggressive competition, and dramatic growth in foreign exchange. Companies of all shapes, sizes, and industries are jumping on the international business bandwagon and expanding their transportation logistics beyond borders to maximize on projected cost savings.
Before you hop on the global business bandwagon, however, you should understand that establishing a cross-border supply chain can be a challenging journey on which you may encounter any number of obstacles. And, what works for your domestic supply chain may not work as well in the global arena.
To competitively globalize your supply chain, you'd do well to adhere to select industry best practices — four of which are listed below, and include creating consistency in execution, the establishment of centralized technology and data, centralizing business rules, and creating global visibility.
Best Practice #1: CONSISTENCY IN EXECUTION

 

OVERVIEW: By virtue of the "e" in ERP, many organizations have already learned the value of managing data and processes at the enterprise level. Typically, best practices are defined, refined, and made part of the enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution prior to implementing or during the implementation process. Values recognized from this approach can and should be carried over to transportation management solutions as well. For global ERP, one should follow suit for all subsystems or complimentary applications to maintain consistency in execution.

 

BENEFIT: When all of the transportation, logistics, and related service providers strive to achieve the same standards of performance, there will be more consistency in the entire global supply chain.

 

PITFALLS: Without building consistency into a global supply chain's framework, inefficiencies and duplication of efforts can impede reliability, driving up costs and reducing services.

Best Practice #2: CENTRALIZED TECHNOLOGY AND DATA

 

OVERVIEW: Too often with geographic diversity, whether it is domestic or global, corporations have a tendency to create islands of technology. This phenomenon is often seen when growth is obtained through acquisition or where systems were in place prior to an acquisition. Technology islands also create data silos which result in disparate knowledge across global supply chain operations.

 

BENEFIT: When key global supply chain technology support systems and data are centralized, it becomes easier to build certain metrics into the transportation management solution of choice. Weekly performance data, for example, can be summed at a monthly level for a macro-level view, and viewing several weeks (or months) at the same time will provide a forecast of future (or a review of past) trends. This can be helpful in managing the buying, forecasting, replenishment, demand planning, and production activities.
Moreover, the aggregate of all demand and supply data into a centralized data repository delivers appropriate views to all levels of decision makers within an organization—allowing them to make critical decisions based on real-time demand.

 

PITFALLS: In addition to the higher costs of maintaining multiple systems to perform basically the same functions, best practices which have been learned and managed for global supply chain management cannot be put into effect until the entire organization has the same tools and methodologies. This situation also perpetuates the existence of technology for longer than expected or desired.
Best Practice #3: CENTRALIZED BUSINESS RULES
OVERVIEW: Once an application becomes an enterprise application, and only when it becomes an enterprise application, can the business rules that define and drive best practices be put into place and centrally managed. This does not limit diversity among the various factions of the organization, but rather allows flexibility for the facility to meet demands and expectations of both the customer and the carrier while maintaining the integrity of the corporate governances and best practices.
BENEFIT: Centralized business rules improve cross-functional business decisions meant to streamline global trade management initiatives while creating and fostering economies of scale.
PITFALLS: The key to global trade efficiency is the consistency and sustainable repetition of defined and centralized business rules. When business rules are not centralized, costly inefficiencies and overlaps in business processes contribute to a fragmented and error-prone global supply chain framework.

Best Practice #4: GLOBAL VISIBILITY

 

OVERVIEW: As manufacturing, distribution, technical, and customer support move to more cost-effective regions of the world, one must also provide the information to support these activities. This information needs to be instantly available to those in these support roles. Global visibility can only be provided by interoperability among the execution systems when this requirement is met. And the interoperability must be real-time to be effective at accomplishing visibility of any value. Dated information is only valuable to historians, analysts, and auditors.
To support the customer or trading partner, information must be current. In addition to being timely, information needs to be presented to the person requiring this visibility through one common interface.
BENEFIT: Companies achieving good visibility for their global supply chains can reduce lead times, inventory levels, and carrying costs while gaining budgetary accuracy that's significantly higher than that of the average company. Global supply chain visibility platforms can also directly impact how successful a shipper is—or is not—when it comes to centralizing trade compliance processes.
PITFALLS: Transparency across the global supply chain is becoming more and more important. Today's global transportation executives want and demand actionable visibility information. Therefore, companies that are not working to improve the visibility of their cross-border supply chains tend to underperform when compared to their competitors, experiencing escalating inventory costs and suffering from unpredictable and erratic delivery performance.
If you practice these four core best practices when building your global supply chain, you will reap the benefits cited, giving you an edge on your competition and keeping you competitive in today's global market.

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Sadaf Atashbarghi, autorka artykułu jest Marketing Managerem w CMS GlobalSoft, Inc. firmie, która zajmuje się zarządzaniem transportem. Jej siedziba mieści się w Springfield, Virginia (USA).
Źródło: CSCMP Comment, vol 42 Maj/June 2008