Technology offers new approach to supply chain management

Senior business leaders increasingly are recognizing that one of the most vital issues in managing a global supply chain is “visibility” – the real-time ability to view the movement of goods and funds as products move through the supply chain.

“The only way to effectively coordinate all elements is to have critical information at your fingertips,” said Gunnar Adalberth, director of e-commerce marketing for UPS Europe. “And we have seen tremendous advancements that improve visibility and provide the information needed to make the supply chain process easier to manage.”

Reporters from a variety of news organizations in Europe will explore the latest advancements in visibility next week during a Technology Summit here sponsored by UPS. The summit will review a variety of technological applications that are making it ever easier to “see” goods move whether in a huge container on a ship, in a small package or envelope or anything in between.

A recent survey of U.S. business executives, conducted by WirthlinWorldwide at UPS’s behest, found wide agreement that today’s modern supply chains still are not very efficient. By a 2-to-1 margin, the executives identified the “next frontier” as synchronizing the entire interaction between vendors, customers and suppliers, not just optimizing small pieces of the process.

“Information technology is the key to providing this coordination,” Adalberth continued. “UPS has made supply chain visibility one of the most important strategic priorities in its efforts to help synchronize global commerce for its customers.”

A global leader in supply chain services, UPS has built massive information technology networks over the past two decades to help capture and use real-time information. These networks make transparent the movement of goods inside corporate supply chains as well as the movement of packages inside UPS’s global network. They support everything from the rapid dispatch of spare parts needed to repair customer equipment to the real-time transfer of funds as a package is delivered.

Flex® Global View, for example, provides UPS customers supply chain visibility of multimodal – air, ocean, ground and rail – transportation, purchase order, Customs and inventory management data via the Web. It also offers customers proactive notification of events they deem important in their daily business operations, from notification of an item held in Customs to confirmation that a critical shipment is en route to their location.

UPS Quantum ViewSM, a suite of three visibility services (Quantum View Manage, Quantum View Notify and Quantum View Data), offers the same type of visibility to customers relying on UPS to move small packages around the world. Using Quantum View, customers can monitor critical packages and proactively notify customers of unforeseen delays — due to weather or Customs, for instance — with exception alerting. Quantum View also can speed cash flow, allowing the finance department to trigger invoices based on prompt delivery notification while providing information that can be used to assess internal charge-backs.

The movement of packages also has been simplified by UPS CampusShip™, which enables employees in different locations to easily process and prepare shipping labels from their own computers while company decision-makers keep tabs on the entire process with centralized control and visibility. Now available in 24 countries and territories, UPS CampusShip lets corporate managers establish company or department shipping guidelines, accurately track shipping costs by department or location and produce detailed reports on usage. More than 9,000 businesses use UPS CampusShip, which was introduced in 2002.

Another advance has been UPS Returns on the Web, a service that allows businesses – even those routing returns back to multiple suppliers – to precisely manage the returns process and analyze returns data for customer behavior and logistics trends.

And through the UPS Product Provider Program, more than 80 software developers have embedded UPS shipping tools in their products, from enterprise resource planning to accounting, customer relationship management, shopping cart and e-commerce systems, extending access to UPS visibility tools to thousands of additional businesses around the world.

“To compete not only within the expanded European Union but also around the world, business leaders must deal with amazing complexity in their supply chains,” concluded Adalberth. “As a matter of strategy, most growing enterprises recognize the need for supply chain expertise from providers that know how to harness technology.”