Increase Your Competitive Advantage with a Demand Driven Supply Chain for High Tech

The fast advance of new technologies and mass customizations have increased the pace of new product introductions and shortened the product life cycles.  Consumer tastes and preferences are diverse and constantly changing.  Time-to-market of new products is the key to gain and maintain market share; equally important is the fast time-to-delivery to meet customer needs.  In response, enterprises have adopted multi-channel strategies with pre-configured products and build-to-order offerings. High Tech companies will need the capability to quickly sense the demands – and even shape the demands – of the market. Equally as important is fulfilling orders within the committed time frame, despite demand volatility and supply variability, to ensure customer satisfaction.

After years of outsourcing to low cost regions, high tech companies continue to face pressure to reduce their overall costs.  Numerous factors including increased competition from low-cost foreign producers and the escalating cost of raw materials and various commodities contribute to the need for lean operations. The practice of extending and expanding supply chains increases supply risks that have the potential to disrupt a manufacturer’s entire value network. This is what the industry has termed as a multi-party, multi-echelon problem.

Both product fulfillment and product returns come with the significant challenge of managing global trading and fulfillment partners. On-time delivery of products to customers requires the coordination of all value chain participants such as factories, contract manufacturers, suppliers, distribution centers and logistics service providers. In addition, returns require the reverse logistics process of managing returned merchandise from customers, etc.

The 20th century way of managing each silo (enterprise) with long delays between silos no longer works with the dynamics of 21st century demand and supply networks. To profitably overcome the challenges the industry faces, organizations need to break down the silos to enable visibility, collaboration and information sharing with upstream and downstream trading partners.

Multi-Party, Many-to-Many, Multi-Echelon Network

The value network of high tech companies consists of factories, distribution centers, contract manufacturers, suppliers, logistics providers, etc. Many raw material suppliers supply to a variety of factories and contract manufacturers that are in multiple tiers. Contract manufacturers may need to supply to many assembly factories. The logistics providers serve across various parties in the network. Our solution connects many parties in the value network and focuses them all on a common goal: Highest possible service at lowest possible cost.

Continuous, Incremental Planning and Execution Across Your Value Network

With a global multi-party, multi-echelon network, it takes a long time to match demand and supply in the network. A plan that takes a long time to re-generate is invalidated by events occurring in execution. To respond to the dynamics of the real world, execution events should be continuously fed back to planning in real time. And, the planning process should incrementally incorporate what actually happened to adjust the plan and to create the actual execution activity whether it is to create and order, shipment, adjust a forecast, etc. Our solution orchestrates plans for the all parties in every echelon. Planning and execution go seamlessly hand-in-hand.

By better connecting with trading partners, high tech companies can harness information like consumer data from retailers in real time to sense the demand trends and drive integrated supply planning and execution. Similarly, by connecting with multi-tier suppliers, high tech companies have the opportunity to quickly and efficiently respond to demand volatility and supply variability. If a commodity price escalates, the impact of it can be propagated downstream from suppliers in real time.

Real-Time Sense and Respond

As a true multi-party, multi-echelon network, the solution offers unparalleled visibility for all participants based on their individual perspective. Not only do all participants in the value network (buyers, suppliers, logistics or DC personnel, etc.) have real time visibility into the data needed to do their jobs, but they can also see the impact their decisions have on all organizations and value chain participants.

The demand/supply models are temporal and therefore can look to the future and sense problems before they occur. The issues can be seen through robust analytics and or alerts, can be based on any data in the system and can be triggered and made visible anywhere in the supply chain and to any participant.

Different from simple visibility tools, this service responds and resolves issues automatically not only creating plans but actually performing the execution activity necessary to resolve the problem. This provides for the worlds first and only multi-party, multi-echelon sense and respond service.

Scalable and Extensible with Accelerated Time to Value

High tech companies heavily invest in solutions through the years.  OEMs have their own ERP and planning systems, contract manufacturers have their own planning and execution systems, etc.  Replacing all existing investments is not only a waste of money but also time consuming.  Our solution connects disparate solutions and embraces them like its own.  Our solution is scalable to handle the huge volumes of transactions generated in a multi-party, multi-echelon system.

While every trading partner can continue to use their existing solution without new investments, our solution can provide and enable new services if necessary. Another unique offering is that we can configure your solution any way you’d like:  With our industry-first Developer Network, you can extend the One Network suite of applications to include your own intellectual property or build a new solution from scratch. All solutions are built using this robust set of developer tools.

One Network currently has over 7,000 companies on our network, of which over 80 are high tech OEMs and over 300 are high tech suppliers. All trading partners can leverage these connections immediately and benefit from a single version of the truth and unsurpassed time to value. Signals from the actual point-of-consumption at the various OEM factories and warehouses are harmonized and provided to the various suppliers with minimal delays.

Companies like Arrow, Avnet, Acal, Vicor, Drager Medical, and Rockwell have been operating on this network for more than three years and achieved higher service levels while reducing inventories and obsolescence. Companies on the network have also been able to use the solution to improve data quality, especially with customer and engineering part changes that are common in the high tech environment.

The power of One Network is the access to a multi-enterprise community with just a single connection. With one connection to our many-to-many network, you can harness the power of information from your entire trading community.

Demand Driven Supply Network Solutions for High Tech

• Intelligent Demand
• Intelligent Logistics
• Intelligent Supply
• Developer Network
• Intelligent Service Parts
• Intelligent VAN