 |
 |
 |
|||
 |
|
||||
 |
 |
 |
|
||
 |
|
||||
 |
|
||||
 |
|
||||
|
Vol 31 - No 07 - November/December 2005 National events : The Integrated Supply Chain - The art of getting your suppliers on board The Institute jointly hosted an event with the National B2B Centre on Wednesday 21st September at the University of Warwick under the title ‘The Integrated Supply Chain – The art of getting suppliers on board’. Charles Tennant, Principal Fellow at Warwick Manufacturing Group, gave the key note address and covered some of today’s key Supply Chain Management (SCM) issues. He gave an overview of SCM history and the processes, before giving an insight into current business thinking. Charles’ key conclusions were that SCM is relevant to all industrial and service sector businesses globally and that Supply Chain Integration is a hot topic with a need for improvement, especially in the New Product Introduction process. Unipart Logistics manage Jaguar’s entire after market supply chain. Chris Roberts, who manages that process from supplier to distribution centres, described how Unipart have addressed the issue of integration with their suppliers via a bespoke solution. Their objective was to integrate the supplier order and fulfilment process with a simple but cost effective solution for the suppliers. They created a web front end, the solution allows suppliers to see and work with up-to-date delivery schedules, to advise Unipart of planned delivery dates and to send Advanced Shipping Notifications. Suppliers benefit through access to real time data, both parties have gained from fewer delivery errors and the time and cost of communicating by telephone has been reduced. Key benefits to Unipart are schedule confirmation and early visibility of supply problems. Ian Davies is Group Purchasing Manager for Calor Gas. He shared with us how Calor, suffering from the high cost of resolving invoice problems, looked to integrate their Purchase to Payment process with suppliers to reduce the problem. Calor selected the Business Exchange (beX) solution from Burns e-Commerce Ltd which allows suppliers to receive and accept orders and to raise invoices, over the web. The portal then matches invoice and order before passing to Calor for payment. A pilot demonstrated clear benefits of this approach to both parties but also showed that raising invoices requires full integration of supplier back office systems with Calor’s. Denis Pelych, Director of the National B2B Centre, spoke about the critical issue of ‘Getting Suppliers On-board’ with Supply Chain integration projects, an area where the Centre has significant experience. The Centre believes it is ultimately about people and that the key element of successful integration with your supply base is managing the change to ensure all parties, including your own staff, understand the need for and reasons behind the changes. Denis introduced several support routes for the leaders of change other than the vendor or management consultant route. These include Business Links, MAS and several industry specific programmes. Denis’ own team also provide support to buying organisations and OEMs, with the added bonus that projects involving West Midlands SMEs are supported free! The morning ended with a Question and Answer session, lunch and the opportunity to see Supply Chain solution demonstrations. Steve Orriss Related Topics:
|
