News: Supply Chain Inovation in Ocean Shipping
Looking for innovation in Supply Chains isn’t hard to do, and it can have a great impact on the efficiency and therefore profitability of a business and market. One place that greatly impacts the success of an integration is the desire to build something new and sexy. I rant sometimes about companies or development teams I have seen go down this path to their own detriment.
But today I want to tell you about a company I heard about that has created new efficiencies through integration efforts of a part of business you may have thought was already integrated. The company is INTTRA. And instead of coming up with an untried technology, INTTRA used a combination of existing technologies to do something new.
In and article published by Supply Chain Digest on March 27, 2009, the describes how INTTRA used existing EDI and XML interfaces of Retailers, Manufacturers and Ocean Shippers to bridge the gap and make a manual process automated.
And Harry Sangree, senior vice president of business development and corporate strategy at INTTRA, gave Supply Chain Digest a quote that I think we can all relate to; “What we set out to do is to take a very un-standardized process and make it standardized.” Is this not at the heart of what we do as Integration Engineers?
They go on to describe another aspect of this business integration that I salute and hope that more companies adopt. They leverage EDI, XML, email and one line web interfaces. This approach lowers the bar of the technology needed to benefit from doing business with end through them.
That leads me to one of the other things I find myself ranting about. Companies that decide that they will only do business with people that do X or Y but not Z. And so they raise barriers that prevent customers from patronizing their businesses. I am sure they feel they have good reasons to do this, but sooner or later, someone is going to go after that business, and the one the restrictive company is targeting. When that happens the restrictive business will be at a financial and market share disadvantage.
So I salute INTTRA, and their efforts to bring the advantages of a more integrated supply chain to ocean shipping companies of all technology levels.
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