Microsoft and Infosys Technologies Respond to Supply Chain Visibility and Collaboration
Challenges of Manufacturers
In our last blog we noted that several high tech and electronics
(HTE) company executives attending the Global Economic
forum said they are placing a premium on gaining greater
visibility into what is going with suppliers, customers and
worldwide operations. The executives’ pain points varied by
company, industry and geography, but all in all they validated
the findings of a KRC Research-conducted survey that Microsoft
and Infosys published in January. Among the key findings:
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50 percent of business decision-makers, such as chief
information officers or vice presidents of operations, reported
increasing complexity in their supply chains.
65 percent reported experiencing a supply chain disruption,
and said it took hours or longer from the time of the disruption to when supply chain systems reported the
incident.
29 percent of high-tech manufacturers produce more than 50 percent of their manufacturing output through third
parties or contract manufacturers, a trend that has increased over the past 2-3 years.
nearly a third of those surveyed reported their supply chain professionals spend 25 percent of their time finding
and re-working supply chain data to get it to the required level of granularity and format. For a high-tech
manufacturer with 50 employees focused on managing the supply chain, this percentage of time per worker
equates to $1.3 million annually in lost productivity, based on the average salary of a manufacturing manager
($105,581), according to IndustryWeek.
We could go on and on about the survey results but you get the picture. A press release is posted here and the full
survey findings are here. We’ll come back to these results in detail in future blogs.
High tech supply chain management is a highly complex endeavor, where you have to deal with managing a
constantly changing, and highly uncertain global business environment, where rapid decision making is critical for
long-term success.. We recently published a case study about Samsung Electronics efforts to strengthen its ability
to manage its global supply chain, particularly for the purpose of preparing for the uncertainties in the high tech
business environment and drive Samsung’s competitiveness. Samsung worked with Microsoft to create an actionoriented role-based productivity solution that enables simulation and on-demand changes of business
management plans leveraging cube write-back capabilities, and empower people to make these adjustments
by using a user interface that is “employee-familiar”. Samsung Electronics deployed a Role-Based Productivity
solution from Microsoft built on SQL Server®, and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server.
The company expects its forecast accuracy for product demands to improve some 20%, which is significant when
event a 1% increase in demand forecast accuracy can lead to substantial cost reduction in raw materials, logistics
and production tasks. The company is expecting a 1000% ROI with enhanced demand forecast accuracy.
For those high tech and electronics companies with other supply chain challenges, our solutions are built upon
core Microsoft technologies, such as Microsoft BizTalk Server ,Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and
Microsoft SQL Server. We’ll be talking more about how these solutions provide Supply Chain visibility and
collaboration in future blogs as well.
For a more thorough discussion of Microsoft in Supply Chain Management, see the HTE supply chain solution page
on our Website and also a specific solution brief. Again, we’ll discuss these in more detail in future blogs.
-Sanjay Ravi