Social Supply Chains

„

Before we discuss about “ social supply chain” , we will look at 2 definitions of Supply Chains

„ “Supply Chain is the activity that manages the flow of information, money, and material across the extended enterprise, from supplier through the functional silos of the firm to customer.”

„  
    A supply chain is a system of organizations, people, activities, information, and resources involved in moving a product or service from supplier to customer. Supply chain activities involve the transformation of natural resources, raw materials, and components into a finished product that is delivered to the end customer.

„  

     

   If we take a look at the above graphic we can see that products flow from the firm to the suppliers to the end customers.  However, the business decisions around those products are based on information that flows from the customers to the suppliers to the actual firm

  Supply chain is being driven by Mobility, Cloud, Big Data.   The Industry's best supply chain will be

„  Migrating from a reactive to a Proactive Supply Chain

„  Striving for Holistic Supply Chain Management

„  Enabling a Predictive Supply Chain

„  Driving towards an In-transit Inventory Allocation Model

„  Establishing a Collaborative Supply Chain Network

„  Evolving to the working style of the ”millennial” workforce

„  

     For the industry’s best supply chain : A social Supply Chain need to be created by facilitating people-to-people communication and collaboration, which is at the heart of managing and executing supply chain processes. And that Supply Chain Operating Networks like GT Nexus enable communities of trading partners to communicate, collaborate, and execute business processes in more efficient, scalable, and innovative ways.

„  
     Simply put, the social supply chain is the application of social networking tools to the process of managing the supply chain. Social networks are all about communication, free-flowing and unstructured communications, and that’s what the social supply chain attempts to incorporate.

„          A Social supply chain is more than just adding a forum or chat alongside every day operations. It means making communication easier and more valuable by infusing social communications throughout the network, tying it to its relevant context, and leveraging the underlying network relationships.

„  

Social supply chain management seeks to incorporate social data, network, and interactions into the supply chain.  

Benefits: If a problem arises, with say a shipment, the customer  should be able to launch a chat with key personnel inside and outside customer’s company who are relevant to resolving the problem. The system could even suggest resolutions based on relationships and data (both historical and real time) from across the network. Any discussion and decisions could be captured and stored for potential auditing and analysis, fueling better suggestions for future problem resolution.

How exactly is a social supply chain different?  There are two differentiating factors of a social supply chain:

Feedback mechanisms

Feedback mechanisms can vary from all sorts of channels and mediums, whether they be APIs or whether that feedback comes from supplier communities or directly through a tweet.  Many companies are now using RFID tags which basically give products a “voice” to communicate with their handlers (you can find out everything you need to know about a product or inventory based on an RFID tag).  The key here are the new channels and methods of information flow and feedback.

Response time

Responses to changes in the supply chain or to suppliers can now be made in almost real-time via social channels. This was not possible even 3-5 years ago.  It’s the same concept that we apply to basic social media interactions.  Nowadays you can find out about and respond to someone in real-time that is talking about you on the web.

There is a lot of research/learning around social supply chains but the concept and idea is very interesting.  In the meantime, what do you think about social supply chain management? Please share your feedback in comments!