In 2003, a few of us founded SupplyScape Corporation (the predecessor to TraceLink, Inc.) with a simple vision. We believed that the next wave of enterprise value generation was in integrating people, processes and information between companies. Our focus and core competency to the industry was to provide the integrative network for supporting the rapid selection and deployment of multi-enterprise applications. Today we express our mission as:

“TraceLink is Creating the Predictable Supply Network by Executing Any Business Process with Any Partner at Any Time.”

This month we announced our strategic partnership with Patheon, Inc. to promote supply optimization in Life Sciences. In our deep collaboration with the executive team at Patheon, we identified a number of immediate value propositions for Multi-Enterprise integration between contract partners and their customers. We have seen these core value propositions validated by every Pharmaceutical and Biotech company we are engaged with on building the Predictable Supply Network.

These value propositions can be classified into 5 areas:

1. Transactional Integration: This is the basic level of integration that allows for business documents representing inter-company transactions to be executed seamlessly. It is always surprising how hard it is to get large and small companies integrated into a common protocol and harmonized data sets to conduct business.
2. Data Synchronization: Beyond transactional documents there is a need to share information about process status, inventory disposition and goods flow between companies. Today teams on both sides are constantly generating reports from one system and sending it to the other company in order for it to be keyed into their system. Cost of labor and inaccuracies impacts execution and planning.
3. Synchronization Frequency: The use of manual processes limits the frequency at which information is exchanged. Monthly snapshots are the norm and weekly are the best one can envision. The ability to automate daily or event based synchronization of information provides both companies an advantage in managing demand and fulfillment. Predictability of supply has an immediate top line effect on revenue as well as a bottom-line effect on inventory costs.
4. Shared Visibility: Too often planners and production managers are looking at separate systems with different versions of the truth. With the TraceLink solution the network synchronizes the harmonized information into shared visibility that is available to teams from both companies. We are able to link and analyze the information and the application is shared between the companies.
5. Ad-hoc Collaboration: Teams need the ability to share documents and notes in order to efficiently execute in a dynamic marketplace. Each team we work with always has a need that cannot be adequately captured through a structured business process. Therefore they need to be able to exchange notes and documents representing instructions, documentation, artwork and many more pieces of information that cannot be categorized a priori.

In order to ease the adoption and maximize the value, we agreed to build an SAP Adapter to integrate SAP implementations with the TraceLink network. Patheon will work collaboratively with us to define and develop the SAP Adapter. This will be of significant value for the industry since SAP is the largest installed base of ERP implementations and the clear leader in the top 50 Pharmaceutical and Biotech companies.

The value propositions represented here are just the tip of the iceberg. In all our collaborations with the industry, we can easily identify more and more business process integrations that will drive higher and higher value. I compare where we are today with where SAP was 30 years ago. The initial value of SAP was to consolidate the information and reporting from a single general ledger. ERP was built from those roots.

The Predictable Supply Network is being built on these five foundational value propositions stemming from our Multi-Enterprise Application.

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The industry is abuzz with Cloud and SaaS applications, but most of them take the same enterprise solution design and provide it in a new deployment model. A conventional application available in the Cloud still requires IT to configure and manage at significant time and cost. When we look at Web-based applications that truly transformed industries (such as Google and Salesforce.com) their approach was to design a new solution centered on providing immediate access of a service to a business user. By empowering an individual to use, learn and share experiences of a business service, we can eliminate the time and cost required from IT to deploy and manage solutions. Instead, we place the solution directly in the hands of the business users via a simple registration process.

Any individual or department leader can use Salesforce.com to manage a sales pipeline or customer service through a simple registration process and credit card payments. In 2000, my VP of Sales at our company came to my office to inform me that he had decided to use a new online sales management tool. Salesforce.com’s tag-line at that time was: “Just Sign-On”. Within a week all the sales people were productively using the sales automation tool. Today, Salesforce.com has over 51,000 customers and other software companies are using a similar solution design for many enterprise business processes.

At TraceLink we also broke the conventional supply chain application model by providing access to a shared workspace, business processes and partner management directly to the individuals that manage supply chain relationships. Anyone can execute any business process with any partner. In the end, we recognized that the people who need the solution everyday are both the best judge of applicability to their business problems and most effective at managing the adoption.

Furthermore, the people centered approach also enables an incremental adoption path for large organizations and complementary access to the smallest organizations. The benefit for constructing a Predictable Supply Network is that we can gracefully scale from the smallest company to the largest enterprise. The benefits of growing application functionality and no-cost of deployment are universally available to everyone on the network.

For a Predictable Supply Network to be effective, people need to be at the center of the solution, since it is their insight and experience which is the best judge for interpreting information. The network needs to support communication of their perspectives and instructions to all the relevant team members. The construction of the team itself can vary from collaboration to collaboration and the tools need to enable the individual team members to identify the appropriate individuals that are required from both companies to successfully manage supply chain operations.

By breaking the traditional model of IT-based application deployment and management, we put the controls directly in the hands of the business user. There can be concerns about overall policies and procedures and these can be addressed by providing management and IT with the tools to monitor and inspect usage for security and cost purposes. Therefore administrative functionality is available to observe the adherence of corporate rules.

Finally, complete traceability and accountability of all actions are available to all the team members. A self-policing team is a far more effective mechanism for compliance than instituting endlessly finer level of access controls. Complete visibility of all actions by users provides preventative protection which is cheaper to implement and maintain.

Empowering business users with immediate access is the first step in transforming the supply chain.

No BullWhip!

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