Best Practices forGlobal Supply Chains

{and why they are worth it}

Time to broaden your supply chain internationally? You wouldn’t bealone. Today’s highly competitive global marketplace demands, atminimum, some level of active involvement or participation in foreignmarkets due to rapidly changing market conditions, aggressivecompetition and dramatic growth in foreign exchange. Companiesof all shapes, sizes and industries are jumping on the internationalbusiness bandwagon and expanding their transportation logisticsbeyond borders to maximize on projected cost savings.

Beore you jump on your international business bandwagon, know thatestablishing a cross-border supply chain can be a challenging journeywrought with many logistical obstacles and that what works or yourdomestic supply chain may not work as well in the global arena. To competitively globalize your supply chain, you’d do well by adheringto select industry best practices—our o which include creatingconsistency in execution, the establishment o centralized technologyand data, centralizing business rules and creating global visibility.

Creating Consistency in Execution

Overview:

By virtue o the “e” in ERP, many organizations have alreadylearned the value o managing data and processes at the enterprise level. Typically, best practices are dened, rened, and made part o the ERPsolution prior to implementing or during the implementation process.Values recognized rom this approach can and should be carried overto transportation management solutions as well. With global instanceso the ERP, one should ollow suit or all subsystems or complimentaryapplications to maintain consistency in execution or all the samereasons as those taken into consideration when exposing the ERP on aglobal basis.

by Sadaf Atashbarghi, CMS GlobalSoft Marketing Manager

Heightening Shipping Eciency for World Commerce

as seen published on

Beneft:

When all o the transportation, logistics, and related service providers strive to achieve the samestandards o perormance, there will be more consistency in the entire global supply chain.

Pitalls:

Without building consistency into a global supply chain’s ramework, ineciencies and duplication o eorts can impede reliability, driving up costs and reducing services.

Centralized Technology and Data

Overview:

Too oten with geographic diversity, whether it is domestic or global, corporations have a tendencyto create islands o technology. This phenomena is oten seen at a high degree when growth is obtained throughacquisition, where systems were in place prior to the acquisition taking place, and in an attempt to allow thefow o inormation to occur between the two disparate systems and organizations short term communicationsinteraces are developed as a quick x, and oten times not transitioned or many years. Islands o technologyalso create data silos which result in disparate knowledge across global supply chain operations.

Beneft:

When key global supply chain technology support systems and data are centralized, it becomes easyto build certain metrics into the transportation management solution o choice. Weekly perormance data, orexample, can be summed at a monthly level or a macro-level view and viewing several weeks (or months) at thesame time provides a view o uture (or past) trends. This can be helpul in managing the buying, orecasting,replenishment, demand planning, and production activities. Moreover, the aggregate o all demand andsupply data into a centralized data repository delivers appropriate views to all levels o decision makers withinan organization—allowing them to make critical decisions based on real-time demand.

Pitalls:

In addition to the higher costs o maintaining multiple systems to perorm basically the same unctions,best practices which have been learned and managed or global supply chain management cannot be put intoeect until the entire organization has the same tools and methodologies. This situation also perpetuates theexistence o technology or longer than expected or desired.

Centralized Business Rules

Overview:

Once an application becomes an enterprise application, and only when it becomes an enterpriseapplication, can the business rules which dene and drive best practices be put in place and managed centrally. This does not limit diversity among the various actions o the entire organization, but rather allows fexibilityor the acility to meet demands and expectations o both the customer and the carrier, while maintaining theintegrity o the corporate governances and best practices.

Beneft:

Centralized business rules improve cross-unctional business decisions meant to streamline globaltrade management initiatives while creating and ostering economies o scale.

Pitalls:

The key to global trade eciency is the consistency and sustainable repetition o dened and centralizedbusiness rules. When business rules are not centralized, costly ineciencies and overlaps in business processescontribute to a ragmented and error-prone global supply chain rameworkcan impede reliability, driving upcosts and reducing services.

Global Visibility

Overview:

As the likes o manuacturing, distribution, technical and customer support move to regions o

Best Practices for Global Supply Chains

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