Visibility & Collaboration in Practice – How to see what’s behind the next crest

Can you achieve higher levels of service while reducing costs in your supply chain by sharing more information and having a better dialogue with your customers and suppliers? Yes. We at PipeChain are 100% convinced of this and we have support for it in research.

PipeChain is now consistently working to help our customers move away from rear-view mirror-based forecasting and pure order-focus, and instead focus on understanding more of the immediate future, i.e., increasing understanding of what’s beyond the next crest. In a concrete sense, this means that we both support and proselytize the great value of the supplying party in a supply chain to be aware on a daily basis of both demand and inventory balances in addition to the order flow from the customer. Achieving this kind of increased visibility is significantly more valuable, closer to the truth and also easier to implement, than trying to get a broad application of forecasting, which many companies have put a lot of focus on for very many years without getting very good effects out of it.

There is much more to be gained than lost by allowing the supplier to quickly obtain information on the situation at the customer’s premises. Lost? Yes, many people do not want to share this kind of information for competitive reasons, but the supplier can still figure out the same thing over time based on the orders the customer places. So we strongly advise our customers to share more information with their suppliers (and also try to get the same information from their customers). When a supplier can see into its customer’s business, the supplier in turn can similarly share the corresponding information with its suppliers. This creates very good conditions to start, in a real way, improving the flows in a supply chain, with the effect of working costs out of the chain instead of just passing them on to someone other than yourself. The result is that everyone improves and thus the whole chain and its competitiveness improves.

Sharing information, creating visibility, is, according to PipeChain, one of the most profitable things you can do in your supply chain. It creates the conditions for better collaboration which in turn results in continuous improvement. What more could we ask for?

– Hans Berggren, CEO PipeChain