1. Tata –Steel Ideation
Enhancing Supply Chain
Visibilty Using Enterprise 2.0
By
Aniket Sarkar
Gaurav Johri
VGSOM IIT Kharagpur
2. What is Enterprise 2.0 ?
• It aims to help employees, customers and suppliers
collaborate, share, and organize information via Web 2.0
technologies
• What is Web 2.0 ?
UGC > Published content
3. Value Chain Visibility
• Trackability or the ability to “see” the products in transit
• Increase in available data - analyzed to make
recommendations
• Strategies to improve and strengthen a supply chain
• 3 out 4 companies in the metals and mining business
consider supply chain visibility as the top most criteria to
manage SCM
4. Why is Value Chain Visibility
important ?
• How ‘lean’ inventory is and not just rely on ‘Just in time’
supplies
• Overseas suppliers – high uncertainty
• Natural weather turbulences and catastrophes that close
down port services
• Enhanced visibility would prepare for any kind of
impending situation - leading to better crisis
management and giving the firms a competitive
advantage above the others.
5. Current status of Steel
Companies
• In general, the B2C segment comprises of about 170-200 wholesale
distributors and 5000-6000 retailers
• Enterprise Resource Planning package like SAP to manage the
Purchasing, Procurement, Inventory, Logistics, Sales and Cash
Management of the products and services.
• ERP is a fully intra-company facility with limited interaction between
the suppliers and dealer/ distributors/ retailers of the company
• Visibility is inhibited by the non-availability of adequate business
tools that is required for an integrated network
6. THE IDEA
• A platform that combines the real time interaction offered
by a social networking platform and the data processing
capabilities of the ERP to manage the supply chain
management
• Currently there are various networking tools offered like
Facebook inc., Twitter and Google +
• The idea would be to develop the platform which
combines the benefits of each and fuse it with the
current ERP system.
7. The IDEA continued..
Why not use the existing Networking platforms ?
• The business in the long run would not be dependent on
the current social media platforms
• There is low long term reliability on social media
platforms
• MySpace
9. The IDEA continued..
• Follows a democratic model
• Information in the form of posts, photos and videos
can be instantly shared with friends
• Feedback can be given in the form of likes, comments
10. The IDEA continued..
• Follows a leader-follower model
• Generally used by people with mass following
• Can instantly update, share information in the form of
tweets
• 142 character limit to maintain efficiency of the system
11. The IDEA continued..
• Closed groups can be formed
• Group chats, video conferencing can be conducted on
short notice
• Reliable Google infrastructure
16. Contd…
In cases of natural calamities that severely disrupt
Tackling supply chain by affecting vendors , distributors, logistics
providers can give real time “tweets” ( the following
emergencies concept of twitter) on the platform that shall notify the
entire downstream players thereby enhancing Visibilty
18. What we assumed ….
• The internet penetration is well above the current 7%
• The people in-charge of operating the combined platform have the
adequate training/competency
• The platform can also be accessed through smart phones for
suppliers or carrying and forwarding agents on the move
• Most importantly the vendor in-charge of programming this platform
has the relevant experience of supply chain management.
• To store the tremendous amount of Data that would be generated
through this combined platform it would require the implementation
of a system like “APACHE Hadoop” which contains the “job tracker”
and “task tracker” applications in its Hadoop cluster.
19. Implementation Road Map
• Stakeholder touch points and bottle necks in Value chain to be
zeroed upon
• Intra company and Extra company applications need to be
developed
• Staged roll out of Enterprise 2.0 with new ERP implementations
20. Implementation Road Map…
• Module specific roll out for existing ERP users
• Extra company applications can be implemented stand alone with
proper interface with legacy systems
21. Cost-Benefit Analysis
• A platform that combines the real time interaction offered
by a social networking platform and the data processing
capabilities of the ERP to manage the supply chain
management.
• Currently there are various social tools offered like
Facebook inc., Twitter and Google +.
• The idea would be to develop the platform which
combines the benefits of each and fuse it with the
current ERP system.
22. Cost-Benefit Analysis…
• From company perspective
The rise in benefits far exceeds the increased implementation cost
The benefits will be realized within the same time span as for an
ERP implementation
• From provider perspective
The costs of Intra-company will exceed Extra-company applications
Joint ventures with established social media platforms can be done
to reduce costs
The huge margins of ERP implementation will realize the benefits in
short time period
23. Road blocks….
• Very difficult
• Extremely costly and time intensive
• Typical: over $10,000,000 and over a year to implement
• Companies will have different Web 2.0 requirements
• A certain level of understanding between stakeholders and
company for appropriate usage of Web 2.0
