“SCM is really a philosophy for improving the enterprise’s competitiveness—and the competitive bar rises continually. Enterprises that wish to exploit these new technologies for an advantage in SCM must look beyond ERP. They must begin by identifying the critical supply chain processes and pressure points that will improve their competitiveness, then assemble and integrate the portfolio of applications, along with the revised processes and measurements, that support the enterprises’ objectives.”

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Supply Chain Management

Technology has driven fundamental changes in the way industrial and manufacturing companies manage their business. With the addition of sophisticated solutions, like warehouse management and ERP systems, as well as advanced data capture and wireless networking tools, companies are squeezing more efficiency out of their operations every day.

In most cases companies have built silos of applications defined by departments or processes. These solutions deliver significant improvements for specific areas they’re designed to manage, but do not do much to unite the entire supply chain. It’s rare for companies to have reached that level of automation or, in some cases, even understand the value of doing so. But the rapidly changing marketplace is creating a greater demand for manufactures to be more agile and flexible in order to meet their needs, and that, in turn, is placing more pressure on managing supply chain.

Supply Chain Management Challenges

Look at any organization within the supply chain and the following will be encountered at some point of time and with some regularity:

1. Incorrect goods shipped
2. Late delivery of goods
3. Difficulty locating goods
4. Excessive effort required to accurately reconcile physical goods to customer orders/returns
5. Goods misplaced/stolen
6. Inaccurate forecast of goods

The typical cause of the problem in the supply chain can originate from any one of the following areas:

• Paper Based Business Processes
• Multiple Re-Entry of Information
• Passive Asset Location Technologies
• Manual Reconciliation Practices
• Human Initiated Business Processes

Any of these elements could lead an organization to lose a competitive advantage that they might hold in the market. Alternatively, removing some of these challenges can drive a less efficient company to a higher degree of competitiveness. Identifying and sizing the business problem is half the battle. The next step is determining the potential benefits and examine if they justify the investments and change required to move to another level.

RFID Based Technologies Achievements

The application of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) based technologies is being used as follows by varying organizations to help solve specific business problems in supply change management:

1. Improve the rework/repair processes by identifying available inventory to fix problems on the bench.
2. Improve failure mode analysis by uniquely identifying and tracing product.
3. Increase visibility into the quantity and location of goods in the warehouse without the overhead of bar code based scanning.
4. Track stock as it moves.
5. Capture more details on our White Papers…