Lothair and Norbridge hosted an Executive Round Table (see sidebar), during which 16 supply chain industry leaders engaged in a spirited, revealing discussion. What follows are their comments – some of the current best thinking on the subject.

DEFINING VISIBILITY AND COLLABORATION

REGAN, Tranzact Technologies: When your say "visibility" to me, what that basically means is the ability to see. When you're saying "turn the lights on," it's the ability to see throughout your entire operation. When you say the word "collaborate" from my vantage point, it's the ability to act. Now somewhere between the seeing and the acting is the thinking.

KIRKEGAARD, Vizional Technologies: Implementing visibility in the supply chain has actually turned the lights on to the whole process. The thing that is really compelling is that visibility reveals the areas that aren't working -- that is the real impact it has had. And that, in turn, brings about collaboration.

POLIS, Dotcom Distribution: From the warehouse perspective, we can't ship it if we don't know what is coming in. When we have visibility, we can plan our outbound freight properly. Ultimately, it all leads to cost savings for our clients, and it increases the quality of Dotcom's services.

When Dotcom's first warehouse was opened last December, it attracted customers shipping both business-to-business as well as business-to-consumer.

One company, HerRoom.com, has quadrupled its sales by managing its business with Web-enabled real-time reports and visibility tools. Of the 800,000 transactions they are managing right now, 80 percent are changes. We can instantly – in less than seven minutes – push this information out to the entire supply chain of this company, so everyone who needs to know is informed that there’s been a change. There’s a lot of power in that knowledge.

JENDROWSKI, NTE: We have been heavily involved in supply chain execution. There, collaboration really is a working community of networks, assets, people, resources, services…you name it. Yet, with the greatest collaboration, the larger the number of people involved, you are going to have errors; you are going to have exceptions. Without real-time defined visibility, and data with integrity, you suffer. They may be separate issues, but at the same time they have to go hand in hand. NTE delivers real-time collaboration tools with our leading customer members.

MARTHA, Mercer Management: Supply chain partners have increasingly behaved in a more collaborative manner. Over the past decade, collaboration has taken many forms – from enhanced communications to outsourcing of key activities such as distribution, manufacturing, and information systems. We like to think that these collaboration initiatives have compressed the supply chain and, in turn, reduced costs.

ALVERENGA, KPMG: It is incorrect to say that you need visibility to collaborate; sometimes it’s actually inversely proportional, which means that the lesser the visibility you have, the more collaboration you need. For example, the reason you collaborate on the demand side is
because you don’t have visibility. Sometimes you collaborate because you can’t get visibility.