Organisations also need to make their supply chain planning process less enterprise-centric, and instead take into account the true end-to-end supply chain. Tim Cavill, managing director Viewlocity Australia and New Zealand, says in the past most SCP has been driven for the particular brand owner or the particular organisation that plays a role in the overall supply chain. "But one of the basic principles is that all of the players in that supply chain must be able to participate, they must be able to connect regardless of their systems, regardless of the technology," he says. "The first thing you've got to do is get all of those players in that extended supply chain talking to each other." Agility is the key, he says, and that agility means being able to hook up with anybody without it taking months but only hours or days, and regardless of their technological sophistication, systems or size. "There are a couple of things that can be done," Cavill says. One is by having a central non-client/server-dependent or non-intrusive integration broker, which enables you to suck data, as opposed to relying on a client/server end each time you hook up from a customer.
"The other [thing that can be done] is for the smaller companies. Some of them don't even capture the data you need to get that visibility of what's happening in the supply chain. So you need to have complementary to that a system which enables the SMEs to enter data and that needs to be through some kind of browser-based transaction/execution system." In that sense, it seems, c-commerce must be driven from the top, with those with the skills and resources to make it all happen.
