SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT
“ Once we started that journey of adding real-time visibility into our platform , we quickly came to additional use cases in the discussion ,” Crowe continued . Predicting ETAs , monitoring theft or other deviations and measuring the CO 2 footprint of the supply chain were among the things identified – particularly the latter , which is still the subject of laborious manual data collection across the globe . “ Many other questions came up that we haven ’ t fully answered yet ,” said Crowe . “ Do we only want real-time visibility data in the system and is that good enough to replace our partially manual milestones ? Do we need to work with an aggregator to achieve that ? Which is the best aggregator software ? None of them has a 100 % global coverage yet , so is that good enough or how could we bring a multitude of them together ?” And if Syngenta does all other questions arise . “ Knowing that something is late is a nice piece of information but what do we want to do with it ? Who should we inform about it and do we want to trigger actions out of it ? If something is on the path to a sea freight shipment and cannot make it on time , do we automatically want to trigger an air freight request ?”
The fundamental question in software terms was thus whether or not a control tower system was needed . Syngenta started looking at the available software . It found that many of control tower systems start at the planning end and have a logistics component integrated into them .
Taking control
“ Is that the right thing if you only want to look at the logistics part or is the organisation ready to look at the planning side as well ?” Crowe said . “ For us , that brought plenty of questions . Is the planning organisation and structure ready at this point when you want to introduce logistics realtime visibility , and is the complexity of your planning structure actually in a space where you can put some control tower software onto that to solve your planning problems ?” Syngenta is also asking whether graphical user interfaces are needed to show where goods are moving or whether it is enough simply to trigger real-time visibility information into its ERP systems . At the moment , the company is inclined to the latter , leaving the graphical user interfaces for just a few users in the central logistics function , but is still debating which interface is needed .
“ The last question , perhaps , is what is the role of your logistics service providers ( LSPs ) and 4PLs ? At the moment they are providing us with our milestones . If we move to an operation where we get all those milestones automatically , what do we still want from them ? “ Should we be reducing the task of what they should be providing for us or do we want to keep both kinds of information and use the real-time visibility to challenge our 4PLs . I don ’ t think we want to go that way because we want to have one source of truth , but there needs to be discussion with the 4PLs and LSPs about how to achieve real-time visibility .” Syngenta , Crowe stressed , has not answered all these questions yet . It is still in the middle of the project . “ The appetite comes with looking into it all and plenty of new use cases come up when you do that . We are at a stage where our set-up is looked at as providing the needed visibility but standstill is not where we want to be . We want to go on and make use of the new tools that are in place .” •
J j
Jesica Arregui
WBR
jesica . arregui @ wbr . co . uk logichem . wbresearch . com
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