Global Logistics and Supply Chain Strategies - August 2008 - (Page 33) they meet customs and trade regulations and to take advantage of preferential trade agreements, says Farinacci. Finally, it is important to involve the supply chain early because competition is no longer based on the product alone but on the effectiveness of the extended supply chain. “It is not just about the design anymore, but also about how effective you are at sourcing, working with suppliers, pricing, getting the raw materials and components there—it is all the supply chain around the finished product plus the design that companies are competing on today,” says Sue Welch, CEO of TradeStone Software, Gloucester, Mass., which has a PLM solution for the retail and consumer packaged goods industries. Fedida underscores that point. “People are not just looking at the technical quality of the product but at the cost and service around it, what we call the augmented product,” he says. “As global competition becomes more challenging, our customers want us to come up with more creative ways to help them solve problems,” says Alstott. “They are looking across their full set of supply chain partners to find ways to compete more effectively.” “The marketplace is telling us that it is not just product innovation that is important but also the supply chain innovation that goes along with it,” agrees Wilson. “Those companies that integrate their supply chain capabilities and do true concurrent supply chain architecting along with product architecting are the ones that will be most successful.” Oracle’s Farinacci summarizes the challenge: “How do we get engineering and development, as they design new products, to start thinking about lead times, global sourcing, quality, regulatory and end-of-life issues? And how do we get all those other stakeholders and all those downstream functions to be part of the process in the early stages?” End-to-end Processes Clearly one answer is by developing endto-end processes. “Process is very critical in enabling continuous product and service innovation,” says Thalbauer. “What we are talking about is very complex. First you have to select the right ideas that might become successful products, which is very difficult, and then you have to move those ideas through development and launch. This requires information from marketing, from manufacturing and also from the supply chain.” SAP has published a PLM road map that it uses in working with customers to introduce and define end-to-end product lifecycle processes, he says. “That is also how we are building our solutions. SAP’s solutions are not focused on PLM or SCM but on supporting this end-to-end process.” To help bridge the walls between functional silos some companies are appointing a chief innovation officer, who is responsible for managing the entire innovation process. According to research from Aberdeen Group, Boston, this strategy can be very effective. A recent survey shows that companies with the best innovation performance are 54 percent more likely than average companies to have an executive dedicated to product innovation. swissworldcargo.com Upload, transport, download: Swiss WorldCargo From computers and game consoles to multimedia systems: with Swiss WorldCargo, all kinds of electronic goods reach their destination quickly, reliably, safely and on time. The products specially conceived for this purpose – Swiss General Cargo, Swiss Valuables, Swiss Argus and Swiss X-Presso – set standards worldwide when it comes to qualitiy and handling. In short: We care for your cargo. GLOBAL LOGISTICS & SUPPLY CHAIN STRATEGIES 33 http://www.swissworldcargo.com http://www.swissworldcargo.com
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