Presented at MDP on 'Demystifying Supply Chain' organised by Management Development Center at Energy Acres, UPES Dehradun

1. Abhik Saha
Director – Supply Chain
Benetton India Private
Limited
MDP organized by Centre for Management Development & UPES Dehradun
2012

2.  Event-driven Economy
 Demand –realized > Demand-satisfied
 Instantaneous
 Any direction, any system
 Exchanging Information isn’t enough
 B2B Application Integration vs. Supply Chain Integration

3.  Traditionally
 Intra-organization
 Integrate external systems
 Impossible to get all member organizations to agree on a set
of standards
 Need
 Layers and layers of middleware

4.  Solution
 Agree on a single communications standard
 Common communications mechanism and middleware
approach

5.  Move information and shared business logic between applications
 Hide complexities of the source and target systems
 APIs (Application Programming Interface)
 Middleware Models
 Publish/Subscribe
 Request/Response

6.  Want to communicate?
 Common vocabulary
 Universally understood
 Messages structured in a standardized way
 Interpreted and acted on
 Exchange of electronic files in a standard format
 Easily processed and automated without human intervention

8.  Human-readable information-exchange standard
 Encapsulates both data and metadata
 Benefits over EDI :
 Less Expensive than EDI
 Not proprietary
 Able to adapt changes
 Not Batch-oriented and as such, have an efficient approach

9.  Web Services
 Applications with business or process functionality
 Standardized XML interface
 Interoperability between disparate applications
 Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)
 Universally accepted and implemented standards
 Enhances cost savings by reducing inefficient processes
 Reduces maintenance of redundant systems

10.  Shift from selling a product to offering a service
 Dynamic and resourceful
 Strategic collaboration between two organizations or business
units
 End-of-life handling of products
 Minimize the physical material flow but maximize information
flow from the order to the delivery cycle