Aberdeen reports that collaboration is on the upswing again. So, what is supply chain collaboration?
"It can be anything from picking up a phone or faxing a spreadsheet to conducting business with your trading partners electronically," says Beth Enslow, Aberdeen's senior vice president of enterprise research. "What's important is that you're exposing more information than before to your trading partners. In turn, you're asking them to use that information to do more than in the past for you, whether it's inventory management, manufacturing, transportation or product design. It's a rethinking who does what pieces of the process."
The concept, of course, never went away. But following the economic downturn in 2001, collaboration projects certainly moved to the back burner at many companies. That is clearly changing, Aberdeen says.
Source: Modern Materials Handling, http://www.mmh.com