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Five tools in supply chains and how to use them. 1) Electronic data interchange (EDI)

TradeLink EDI is a full featured business document broker designed to allow organizations to seamlessly receive and send business documents to/from its trading partners and update its internal systems automatically. TradeLink EDI provides data transformation, business process management system integration and audit capabilities to manage organizations business processes for the:

* Order/Invoice/Payment Cycle * Warehouse/Logistics/Transportation * Vendor Managed Inventory/Scan Based Trading * Supply Chain Synchronization including Global Data Synchronization, e-Catalog and UCC.NET

Benefits include: * Improved operational efficiencies of manually intensive business processes by automating business document input, validation and auditing. The sophisticated audit provides a simple view of business information across different systems, and its proactive alerts help you manage exceptions so you can respond immediately to unplanned events. * Improved Customer Service by providing internal and external business partners with “status” information on business information flows inside and outside an organization. * Improved business responsiveness through greater visibility and adaptability to changing business requirements. New business partners, platforms, document formats, technologies and business processes can be added quickly and efficiently while maintaining centralize control. * Improved reaction time to supply chain issues. As 80% of a business’s document information flow now relies on electronic transfer of information, any loss of information flow is unacceptable for clients, suppliers, or trading partners (both internal and external). To maximize ROI, proactive and intelligent surveillance of business document transfer is critical. Receiving an alert at the end of a day is no longer acceptable as receiving information when problems occur along with how to solve the problem is required. Notified of a problem, a user can rapidly identify the root cause and correct it by operations such as: correcting incorrect information, retrying the transfer, canceling the transfer, executing an alert to the appropriate person(s) – by e-mail for example – of the risk of client-impact from a problem in the supply chain. * Compliance to regulatory requirements. For reporting companies, regulatory requirements such as Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA are a fact of life. TradeLink’s sophisticated audit and document management features allows an organization to comply with regulatory requirements in one central solution.

2) Bar codes

Barcode technology helps to identify and track products since it is a simple and inexpensive method. A barcode is an optical machine-readable representation of data. A typical bar code usually consists series of parallel, adjacent bars and spaces. These predefined bar and space patterns or "symbologies" are used to encode small strings of character data into a printed symbol. Barcode technology helps keep track of products and services that they identify, and therefore provide all necessary information about them. Every point of the supply chain involves vendors and suppliers who must be able to provide all details when asked. Their inability to do so will mean being left behind and their job assigned to a competitor. The use of barcodes would ensure detailed and correct information, which ultimately helps to reduce costs. Barcodes provide accuracy and speed that help in reducing expenses incurred to rectify errors made by manual oversight or faulty data entry.

Types of Barcodes

1D Barcode
Barcodes that represent data in widths (lines) and spacing’s of parallel lines, are called 1 dimensional (1D) barcodes or symbologies, they are also called as linear barcodes.

2D Barcode
Barcodes that come in patterns of squares, dots, hexagons and other geometric patterns within images referred as 2 dimensional (2D) barcodes. They are also called as Matrix codes. The advantage of 2D barcodes over 1D barcodes is that it can encode several thousand bytes of data in a single bar code symbol. To read 2D barcodes special bar code readers are required.

3) Radio frequency identification

Radio frequency identification, or RFID, has the potential to revolutionize the way business is conducted. Consisting of three parts, a chip, a reader, and a database, RFID can automatically identify people and objects by a 100-digit tag and track them through the supply chain. As they move through the process, RFID readers collect information on the products and match their tag numbers to a central database, which provides access to all information regarding the product. Implementing RFID technology could increase a company’s efficiency and productivity when conducting business on both a national and global scale.

4) Build-to-order

In an automotive context, BTO is a demand driven production approach where a product is scheduled and built in response to a confirmed order received for it from a final customer. The final customer refers to a known individual owner and excludes all orders by the original equipment manufacturer (OEM), national sales companies (NSC), dealers or point of sales, bulk orders or other intermediaries in the supply chain. BTO excludes the order amendment function, whereby forecast orders in the pipeline are amended to customer requirements, as this is seen as another level of sophistication for a build to stock (BTS) system (also known as build to forecast (BTF)).

The main advantages of the BTO approach in environments of high product variety is the ability to supply the customer with the exact product specification required, the reduction costly sales discounts and finished good inventory, as well a reduction in stock obsolescence risk. The main disadvantage of BTO is manufacturers are susceptible to market demand fluctuations leading to reduced capacity utilization in manufacturing. Hence, to ensure an effective use of production resources, a BTO approach should be coupled with proactive demand management. Finding the correct and appropriate balance of BTO and BTS to maintain stock levels appropriate to both the market requirement and operational stability is a current area of academic research.

5) Internet

An Internet-enabled supply chain helps companies, avoid costly disasters, reduce administrative overhead, reduce unnecessary inventory, decrease the number of hands that touch goods on their way to the end customer, eliminate obsolete business processes, reap cost-cutting and revenue-producing benefits, speed up production and responsiveness to consumers and garner higher profit margins on finished goods Effective integration of an Organizations supply chain can save millions, improve customer service and reduce inventories.

The key to getting optimum value out of automating your supply chain is to make sure you have your internal systems working well before you start extending them out over the Internet. One should envision the business as a whole including its current strategy and where it wants to go. Supply chain strategy is increasingly being integrated with overall corporate strategy. The cost of training people to use new software should not be underestimated. Sending information around the world takes lesser time than it takes to get into someone's mind.