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Collaborative supply chain management from IBM
Executive summary Business view Technical details
The goal
Improve collaboration and customer satisfaction
Successful collaborative supply chain management streamlines business processes by helping you enforce schedules, optimize stock levels, avoid errors, improve performance and automate processes. The collaborative supply chain management solution from IBM can help your business deliver the right products to the right customer.

The advantage
Why IBM?
We built our own collaborative supply chain in 1999. During this transformation, we developed repeatable methodologies and tools that can streamline communication between your associates. The collaborative supply chain management solution from IBM can help identify your specific needs and develop a customized strategy and roadmap for success. IBM provides:
  • Expertise developed from thousands of e-business implementations.
  • Industry experts to help you design and implement a successful supply chain strategy.
  • Relationships with leading application vendors to provide the applications needed to customize a solution for your business.
  • Experience from our own success, which enabled us to communicate more efficiently with over 24,000 suppliers and save more than US$377 million.

The benefits
Supply chain alignment
The collaborative supply chain management solution from IBM can help you eliminate costly supply chain errors. This solution extends visibility into supply chain processes and data to internal and external partners. Now misaligned supply chain expectations can be identified and resolved quickly.

The collaborative supply chain management solution from IBM can help your business:

  • Satisfy customer needs by maintaining correct service levels of inventory.
  • Accurately forecast and respond to customer demand spikes.
  • Track the flow of material, information, and revenue—from origination to sale.
  • Avoid invoice errors and loss associated with reconciling them.
  • Support the success of promotions, product placement and advertising.

IBM e-business on demand™ practices can help automate your business processes, improve resource management and business collaboration—between employees, partners, suppliers and customers. Our solution can provide:
  • The procurement tools, knowledge and business processes needed to optimize your sourcing strategy for each commodity and supplier.
  • Visibility into the value chain to help you forecast supply demands and capacity constraints, while tracking inventory and shipment status.

The approach
Stocking what the customer wants
A major U.S. supermarket group is using the collaborative supply chain management solution from IBM to improve information and product exchange between distribution centers, stores and suppliers.

Our solution helps them deliver the right product, to the right place, on time, in the right quantities and at the right price. With rich data warehousing capacity for category management and other grocery-specific functionality, the solution significantly enhanced their capability to respond quickly to demand and market changes. They have lowered operating costs and enhanced product assortments throughout North America.

The solution included new tools to manage their business to greater levels of detail, improve category management and deliver superior merchandise to their customers.


The financial advantage
Gain value through cost reduction
The collaborative supply chain management solution from IBM can help your company achieve measurable bottom-line savings. The value of your business can be enhanced by reducing:
  • Out of stocks errors to increase revenues by up to 10%.
  • Inventory levels by up to 40%.
  • Obsolescence expense by up to 50%.
  • Transportation and expediting costs by up to 20%.