Strategic Supply Chain Management - Supply Chain Online

166 Strategic Supply Chain Management
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Software applications will be extended to multiple tiers of suppliers
and distributors. While collaborating with multiple customers
and suppliers will be the norm, companies will still reserve
deeper planning and forecasting efforts for a select set of partners.
Collaboration with materials suppliers will continue to be transaction-focused,
whereas relationships with service suppliers will
be more strategic and focused on planning.
Applications will be built on top of an Internet-based architecture
hosted externally.
Collaboration increasingly will focus on the front end of the supply
chain, with heavy emphasis on collaborative forecasting and
replenishment models.
Use of industry-standard tools, such as RosettaNet PIPs and CPFR,
will become the dominant forms of collaborative communication in
the electronic and consumer products sectors.
As a management discipline, collaboration is still in its infancy. We
believe that it will change the economics of all companies as business
practices, rules, and conventions are adjusted to reflect the realities of
integration and increasing visibility across supply chains. Collaboration
will allow smaller companies to compete with larger companies, making
scale less critical as a competitive differentiator. Collaboration will
become an essential discipline—and an inevitable part of your supply
chain strategy. See Figure 4-6 for a collaboration guideline.