Supply Chain Optimization
Collaborate with Complete Visibility with Suppliers across the Supply Chain
Collaborating across the entire supply chain is the holy grail for retailers, because it can yield significant benefits, not the least being increased sales, because all parties – from retailer to manufacturer to raw materials supplier – know and can react to actual demand for products globally at all times. Additionally, companies want to squeeze out operational costs due to fragmented, highly distributed supply chains; manual, ad-hoc processes; and inconsistent, error prone product, pricing, and packaging data. These inefficiencies lead to missed deadlines, delayed promotions, lost revenue, and unhappy retail partners and customers.
For example, to ensure sufficient supply of a flu drug at all times, a drug manufacturer needs to predict the global impact of flu conditions, such as occurred with the 2005 avian flu epidemic or the 2009 swine flu pandemic, requiring close collaboration with suppliers to ensure adequate raw materials in any event. They also need constant supply visibility during distribution, so they can quickly divert supply to alternate destinations experiencing greater demand.
TIBCO's event-driven infrastructure and business process management (BPM) technology is being used by retailers, manufacturers, and their suppliers to automate, integrate, and collapse the supply chain. A product purchase triggers a real-time simultaneous movement of demand information that is correlated with events occurring in all stores, warehouses, retailer headquarters, manufacturers, and suppliers. TIBCO’s complex event processing (CEP) technology and visualization technologies analyze and predict future likely purchasing trends. Thus suppliers can provide needed raw materials, manufacturers can build enough product, and retailers can keep products stocked to meet demand – even agilely diverting supply from location to location as needed.
