What are the roadblocks to installing supply chain software?
Gaining trust from your suppliers and partners.
Supply chain automation is uniquely difficult because its complexity extends beyond your company's walls. Your people will need to change the way they work and so will the people from each supplier that you add to your network. Only the largest and most powerful manufacturers can force such radical changes down suppliers' throats. Most companies have to sell outsiders on the system. Moreover, your goals in installing the system may be threatening to those suppliers, to say the least. For example, Wal-Mart's collaboration with P&G meant that P&G would assume more responsibility for inventory management, something retailers have traditionally done on their own. Wal-Mart had the clout to demand this from P&G, but it also gave P&G something in return-better information about Wal-Mart's product demand, which helped P&G manufacture its products more efficiently. To get your supply chain partners to agree to collaborate with you, you have to be willing to compromise and help them achieve their own goals.
Internal resistance to change.
If selling supply chain systems is difficult on the outside, it isn't much easier inside. Operations people are accustomed to dealing with phone calls, faxes and hunches scrawled on paper, and will most likely want to keep it that way. If you can't convince people that using the software will be worth their time, they will easily find ways to work around it. You cannot disconnect the telephones and fax machines just because you have supply chain software in place.
Many mistakes at first. There is a diabolical twist to the quest for supply chain software acceptance among your employees. New supply chain systems process data as they are programmed to do, but the technology cannot absorb a com无耻悲鄙下流的网"学.网总是抄辣,文^论,文.网http://www.751com.cn to predict demand for a product, an automaker put in an order for an unusually large number of units. The system responded by predicting huge demand for the product based largely on one unusual order. Blindly following the system's numbers could have led to inaccurate orders for materials being sent to suppliers within the chain. The company caught the problem but only after a demand forecaster threw out the system's numbers and used his own.
That created another problem: Forecasters stopped trusting the system and worked strictly with their own data. The supplier had to fine-tune the system itself, then work on reestablishing employees' confidence. Once employees understood that they would be merging their expertise with the system's increasing accuracy, they began to accept and use the new technology.
Many B2B exchanges say they offer supply chain software. Should I use their software or install my own?
Public (many-to-many) B2B exchanges and private (you to everyone else in your supply chain) exchanges began with grand promises of auctions and procurement savings for members, but few suppliers were tempted. Since then, most of these websites have morphed into becoming online hosts for supply chain software. For small companies that can't afford to buy the software on their own, the public exchanges will probably be their source. But for now many of the offerings are immature and aren't getting much use. Companies that can afford to are building their own private connections with their trading partners online rather than going through public exchanges. But even these companies will eventually use the public exchanges when they can. Building and maintaining software just isn't a great deal if there's someone out there willing to do it for you.
The ambitious public exchanges, with their independence and neutrality, hold out the hope of attracting more buyers and suppliers together in one place, but the level of specificity of a public exchange's supply chain software will probably never reach the depth that a company could build with a select few suppliers in a private exchange. So most decision makers are saying they will use public exchanges for the generic supply chain connections they make, and build their own for the really strategic deep, supply chain relationships they have