[photopress:catalyst.jpg,full,alignright]Chain execution is a chilling phrase which suggests something quite dreadful. Yet it is essential to the efficiency on logistics and is becoming a serious subject of investigation for the major companies of China. It is dealing with the supply of goods as a continuous chain from one end to the other.
Noah Dixon, vice president of product management for Catalyst International, a provider of supply chain execution software and warehouse consulting services, said, ‘One of the things we’ve noticed over the last three or four months is that we get more hits at 1 a.m. on our Web site than at any other time of day. And what we’ve discovered is that it’s traffic from China.’
Noah Dixon says that Asian visitors are hungry for information about supply chain management. He said, ‘They’re looking at all the content we offer, and they’ll spend 15 minutes a visit on the site.’
The visitors aren’t from multi-national companies doing business in China. They are from locally owned companies apparently looking for information on improving their operations.
Noah Dixon said, ‘The Chinese companies we’ve dealt with are expert merchants and manufacturers, but modern logistics is new to them. They can’t do order turnarounds and meet the shipping and data requirements of their multi-national customers just with manpower.’
At the same time, he adds, there isn’t a home-grown supply chain execution software industry to turn to for applications.
That creates an opportunity for smaller software companies with under $100 million in revenue, like Catalyst, which is Noah Dixon’s company.
Noah Dixon said, ‘The question we’re asking, and I think all of our competitors need to ask, is whether we spend money in China or not, and whether we do it now or wait.
He said, ‘In the U.S. and Europe, we have always sold our solutions on the basis of cost savings, especially from labor. Given that their cost of labor is so low, we have to present a different message.’
And that message revolves around the quality of customer service that comes from a high quality supply chain execution solution, the ability to meet customer data requirements, and the ability to control those things that do represent a high cost to the business, like inventory and transportation.
It is an area where China is starting almost at the beginning and is now start to gallop forward in executing the whole chain of supply from beginning to end. Supply chain execution.
Source: Modern Materials Handling