Business Platforms – BPO meets Technology: Business platform for next generation supply chain

Recall your last visit to nearby fast food restaurant where in spite of long queue you don’t have to wait for a long time. Thanks to the ‘order pick’ person, who suggests you to place order from a standard combination menu and helps finalize your order in no time. And you probably don’t even wait more than a minute at the cash counter. This is an excellent demonstration of ‘make-to-assemble’ strategy in collaboration with suppliers by fast food restaurants thereby realizing supply chain agility. Of course the standardization of product & process and underlying technology plays the most important role over here.

Manufacturing organizations are trying to emulate this vision (though in no way, manufacturing supply chain complexity can be compared with fast food supply chain) for their next generation supply chain by focusing on core processes and taking a balanced approach on ‘cost’ and ‘flexibility’ in collaboration with their suppliers. Today’s tough economic situation has given another fillip to this drive by organizations increasingly focusing on their core operations and outsource non-core operations to providers, who consider their ‘non-core as core’. We are noticing increased instances where in organizations are seeking to outsource on a ‘true’ managed service (aka platform) model - i.e. outsourcing of processes on provider’s technology platform driven by business outcome based ‘Pricing’ and ‘SLAs’. This way organization are also seeking to drive innovation at supplier’s end and move towards next generation supply chain in an effective way. For an accelerated platform business case organizations also need to have a transparent & generally accepted ‘cost benchmark’ in place along with expected service levels.

Comments

As technology is upgraded in less time, interchange encountered in the supply chain will be between different business firms that will seek to increase revenue within the circle of interest. But this may have less, no knowledge or enthusiasm in supply chain.Self-adapt chain of businesses that agrees to produce and services.

Posted by: angie | July 3, 2009 5:17 AM

Firms are certainly striving towards self adapted supply chain seeking to accommodate increased level of flexibility. You are right - Technology is in fact playing a role as 'accelerator' rather than just 'enabler' and there's a manyfold increase in collaboration between different business firms especially in the non core operations.

Posted by: Gurjeet | July 8, 2009 8:18 AM