Supply Chain Management

One of the side affects of the increasing levels of specialisation that characterises modern society, is that very few businesses can be entirely self sufficient in all their needs. And as soon as you are working in partnership with other entities (people or companies), the need to provide smooth information flows become vital.

At its most obvious level you might have the component that has to be delivered ‘Just In Time’ so as to keep the production lines running without bloating the stock holding requirement. But there are many other less obvious areas, such as out sourced services for marketing or product documentation, where deadlines all have to synchronised and smooth information flows managed.  And we all know that it is hard enough to manage these communications when people are sitting in the same office, let alone when they are in different towns, countries or even continents.

Whatever the supply chain issue, the flow of data is always going to be key; and the balance between the security and the availability of that information will be a vital consideration.

For years, our team of software engineers have been building and using collaboration tools. For example:

• For online Magazine sales: matching the daily delivery with the outstanding subscriptions, managing the packing lists that result and keeping the stock control in line. (See Newsstand)
• Building collaboration tools for the delivery of O&M manuals (Operations and Maintenance Manuals) for Main contractors in the construction industry. Involves the collection of massive amounts of data on all aspects of the project and then presenting it in an easy to access format. (www.denaploymanuals.co.uk)
• Major Pharmaceutical company: Global integration of the sales forecast for each country in the world, of a particular cancer treatment drug produced by a major pharmaceutical supplier and presentation in a Tableau data visualisation that enables marketing to create their own analysis of the aggregate data

The tools that we use for this type of work are very varied, but at their heart are database management that ensure that the raw data is ‘clean’. Software that manages the flow of data and its security. A presentation layer that makes it easy for non IT professionals to use the data – Tableau, Power BI, Web pages and (increasingly) mobile app presentations. (See other articles on Data Visualisation).

Because we build all our software from the ground up, using standard software tools, we can rapidly amend and change processes as the world changes its requirements. E.g. if there are changes required to meet whatever version of Brexit eventually is passed, we are able to implement them on our own software platforms very quickly.