Perceptibility
Organizations are becoming increasingly attuned to the need for greater perceptibility into their operations – the procurement of raw materials, their assembly in the production line, packaging, transport of finished goods to a storage facility, transfer to a distribution center, the arrival at the retail outlet and then, the final sale when the customer makes the purchase. But this granular level of perceptibility cannot imply additional workloads for an organization’s third party vendors. There must be an efficient mechanism for information sharing.
Traditional approaches to carry out supply chain operations with extensive manual execution are giving way to a new and improved network where smart technology based devices and systems do most of the work with little to no human intervention. Transport vehicles, storage facilities, store racks, raw materials and components that make their way through the supply chain will collectively provide data that gives organizations an integrated perspective on business processes. While this is beneficial for designing more resilient supply chain plans, process efficiency can also be assessed in real time.
The need for greater perceptibility has already started changing the world we live in. In agriculture, for instance, smart technology is being used to plan and schedule irrigation, fertilization and other such activities based on data driven inputs, thereby increasing crop production. One innovation that’s being currently tested in the lab is a device that can be fed to the animal. From inside the animal’s body, this device will provide farmers crucial statistics such as temperature, infection levels, ovulation and many more. Farmers can also keep a tab on parameters that affect water quality such as the table level, concentration of iron, salt and various minerals. Transportation and navigation routes can be altered based on real time traffic updates. Stock markets, economies, global indicators and other factors can be analyzed to forecast future occurrences such as workforce availability, utility prices and the target consumer’s purchasing power.
It might seem ironic, but perceptibility at such a granular level will come at the inconvenience of having too much data to process. Supply chain teams will have their task cut out while deciding on what to look at, when and where. This again would depend on the enterprise’s resiliency objectives, their mission critical operations and available resources. Thankfully, present day supply chain management teams can sift through the torrents of data coming into their systems through smart technology enabled modeling, analytics and simulation techniques.
Being Prepared
- How will the organization respond to the insights provided from a granular level of perceptibility of supply chain operations?
- Is perceptibility being facilitated by human personnel or devices, objects and systems?
- More data of different varieties will be generated at greater speeds. How will the enterprise handle this inflow of information?
Increasing Perceptibility through a Machine Aided Approach
- Replenishing stocks in store racks
- Managing alert notifications using an event driven architecture by monitoring thresholds and tolerances
- Performing various perceptibility enhancing operations such as forecasting, planning, managing ongoing obligations, goods in transit and other such activities using smart technology based devices such as sensors and RFID tags
- Immediate identification of the source of a problem through real time perceptibility into transactional event information
Increasing Perceptibility through Connectivity
- Integration across multiple enterprise resource planning systems
- Common platform that supports collaboration between different entities such as external providers, clients and business associates along with assistance in decision making and collating data from different sources
- Forecasting future trends in sales by location through synchronization
- Mapping supply and demand requirements using just in time and demand driven methodologies
- Pan network performance management framework
Increasing Perceptibility through Data Driven Systems
- Anticipating volume of goods in transit through predictive analytics
- Assessment of services along with storage efficiency improvement
- Optimizing suggestions for purchasing merchandize
- High end features that assist in decision making, automation and self actuation
- Assisting purchase and sale decision making by leveraging the different response options that will be available during forecasted events
Case Study
One of the foremost producers of commercial airliners caters to more than fifty percent of world’s requirements for commercial aircrafts with a capacity in excess of 100 seats. Raw materials, parts and components were sourced from different providers spread across the globe. Monitoring all these different items as they were transported from different storage locations to one of the aircraft manufacturer’s production center had become a very challenging, tedious and error prone activity.
In a mammoth effort to reduce operational glitches by increasing perceptibility, a smart sensing solution was deployed across the corporation’s supply chain network. Strategies included the identification of deviations from prescribed transit routes along the supply chain. For instance, shipments were encased with RFID tags. When these shipments passed through important intersection points in the network, reading devices were used to cross examine the information on these RFID tags. This enabled early detection of a number of issues such as delays in delivery, missing components, incorrect transit route and so on. The response teams would be immediately notified to rectify the situation before the matter escalated and slowed down production.
The commercial aircraft manufacturer’s operations are an undertaking of herculean proportions, given the scale and complexity of its business processes. Through its smart sensing solution, the corporation could anticipate delays and issues even before they occurred. The frequency and intensity of operational glitches came down drastically, along with the expenditure associated with fixing them.
And that the supply chain management team could accurately track all the parts and components in transit across the network, the airline manufacturer was also able to bring down its expenditure on storage infrastructure. Transport efficiency across the network increased.
Whether they were forecasted, unexpected, related to expenditure, competition, market trends or customer expectation, the aircraft manufacturer was now in a position to effectively confront challenges of any kind, thanks to a supply chain framework that facilitated a granular level of visibility into its operations.
See for yourself how the application works
Witness our cloud based platform’s security capabilities in action
Play around with the software and explore its features
Compare and choose a solution that’s relevant to your organization
Consult our experts and decide on a pricing mechanism
Disasters
