Boston January 3, 2002 The increasing complexity of today's extended enterprise is spurring new technical and process challenges for supply chain performance. However, a new breed of supply chain event management (SCEM) solutions is helping companies better work with their trading partners while reducing supply chain costs, according to a new study from technology consultancy Yankee Group.
Companies continue to be hampered by the lack of real-time visibility into trading partners' business processes and encumbered by costly inefficiencies, the consultants assert in their report, "The Evolving Supply Chain: Visibility and Event Management." The report takes an in-depth look at the emerging technologies that are being developed to help businesses leverage real-time information visibility across the supply chain.
To reduce total supply chain costs, drive efficiency and increase customer responsiveness, companies are now turning to SCEM solutions. Yankee says the new solutions enable businesses to collaborate in a decentralized fashion; monitor inventories, orders, demand, and constraints across the supply chain; and optimize related business processes allowing proactive resolution of problems and issues in real time while aiding existing plans.
"SCEM solutions offer an executional approach to managing supply chain processes versus the traditional planning-driven, internally focused forecasting systems we use today," said Kosin Huang, B2B commerce and applications analyst at Yankee and author of the report. "The progression of business processes being extended outside the enterprise will continue to drive the need for visibility, coordination and optimization."
The Yankee Group report examines the shortcomings of today's processes and applications for supply chain management and the emerging class of SCEM solutions that are changing the way companies manage the extended supply chain.
