Magazines Archives - 2009 December

Information sharing vital to the future of supply chain in Asia
Story 15 - Ecommerce

Availabilit y and sharing of information in supply chains across Asia continues to be the topic of discussion among retailers and manufacturers across the region, and has been singled
out as the key to improving supply-chain activities. The significance of sharing data can determine businesses’ ability to work together effectively, continued the report from the Global Commerce Initiative
(GCI), research group Capgemini, and technology vendors SAP and HP.

“Many companies still tend to keep their information within silos, unavailable not just to external bodies, but also to different departments within the same organisation. While corporate-wide implementation of enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems is slowly helping to improve the availability of information,
there is still a long way to go,” the report said. Titled Succeeding in a Volatile Market – 2018: The Future Value Chain, the GCI report is based on four country workshops (the Netherlands, Hong Kong, India and Japan) held last year, which evaluated current market conditions and trends, and discussed the
implications on the future for retailers and manufacturers.

Of the four countries, India and Japan are considering using information to improve the supply chain in their countries among their priorities.

Sitting at two extremes on the technology spectrum, India and Japan posed two separate issues in terms of where they stood in their supply-chain activities, the GCI report noted. For Japan, implementation of technology to retrieve information had already taken off, and businesses identified that RFID (radio-frequency identification) technology had been integral in the information-sharing process.

India, despite its challenges such as decreasing efficiency, increased wastage and rising costs, remained “well placed to learn from its global counterparts in terms of data sharing and using electronic data interchange (EDI) frameworks”, the report established.

It continued that the high entry cost and complexity of starting EDI programmes in India, which has previously prevented small manufacturers and retailers from deploying such solutions in their supply chain, was negligible as low-cost options such as on-demand software-as-a-service models are now
readily available.

The GCI also noted that issues in a supply chain were already being addressed following an earlier report titled 2016: The Future Supply Chain. The 2016 report said that in order for retailers and manufacturers to leverage the benefits of their supply chain in the future, mindsets need to be changed.
“Some companies see information as a revenue source and are reluctant to share it, while there is a lack of general agreement among the members of the value chain about which data is collaborative
and which competitive,” it said.

The report continued that in the supply chain of the future, the industry “must design for new parameters like CO2 emissions reduction, lower energy consumption, better traceability and reduced traffic congestion”. Realistically, while the impact of these parameters may not be substantial now, they will
impact and grow in the coming years, the report maintained.

“Realising the 2016 Future Supply Chain will require a combination of improvements by individual companies and collective initiative by groups of retailers, manufacturers, suppliers and
value-chain companies, such as logistics service providers,” it concluded.

The 2018 GCI report also considered the impact of the credit crisis on both companies and consumers, based on trends that were slated to develop in four economies.

Aside from the declining economy, 130 practitioners and experts gathered to discuss changes in social structures, cost and availability of raw materials, adoption of consumer technologies and concerns over product safety, among other trends, with a focus on developments in Asia and how these would
impact businesses 10 years from now.

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