Collaboration and Business Process Management

The very nature of supply chains is about collaboration. To succeed, the goods must flow seamlessly through the chain; therefore, the shared information must flow seamlessly as well. A break at any point in the chain is detrimental to the process and your business. Businesses recognize the importance of this information flow as well as the systems and integrations that provide it. What is often overlooked is the people that create, consume, and fix the systems, integrations, and processes.

The next opportunity for creating value in the supply chain is in the trading community. It is knowledge sharing and content management. It is using social networking tools, like the Inovis Social Network, to exchange contact data and company profiles with your trading partners. By having always-accurate partner data, you can quickly find the right contact at a supplier, third-party logistics (3PL) provider or contract manufacturer to resolve issues with purchase orders or shipments before they cause problems downstream.

Enabling Collaboration and Business Process Management is the very core of what Inovis does. Our 25 years of managing collaboration amongst hundreds of thousands of business relationships, coupled with our aggressive use of innovative technologies such as social networking, web 2.0 portals, and multi-enterprise workflow engines has created a platform offering unique in the market. We have embedded this technology into the fabric of the common interactions we have seen in those business relationships. This powerful concept of collaboration in context of the transactions, systems, events, and issues arising out of a trading relationship manifests itself in two key types of collaboration.

Two Main Types of Collaboration:

Structured collaboration—Rolling out multienterprise processes with your partners, such as new item introduction or the resolution of discrepancies between an Advanced Ship Notice (ASN) and a physical receipt of goods at a distribution center. These are processes that have very specific actions and tasks that have to take place in order to collaborate amongst well-defined roles in each organization.

Unstructured collaboration—Sending out announcements to subsets of my trading community, managing content, training material or message boards in a portal, or collaborating with a customer or partner around a specific problem or issue.

By deepening your organization's relationships with the people in your business community, you can better manage your customer/supplier/partner relationships, solve problems more rapidly, improve customer satisfaction and compete differently in the market.