Crying out for visibility over the product instance lifecycle? Don′t underestimate the role of good old ERP transaction journals

One thing has always been the same amongst supply chain professionals: the constant aspiration to achieve a state of “visibility”. Be it visibility of supply chain capacity, material availability, consumer demand, the strategic technology roadmap, the new product introduction plan, returns, claims...

Today, the old call for “visibility” is often rephrased into terms like “sensing”, “big data analytics”, “Digital feedback loops”, “Integrated business planning”  and spiced up with terms like “Digital”, “IoT”, “Cloud” ,“AI”, “Twins” and “Event stream processing” etc. There is no arguing that new technologies changes what “visibility” and the consequent methods for “decision making” from that visibility is. There is an ocean of opportunities and a lot of fascinating jobs to be found where new buzzwords for digital information processing meets business process innovation.

Methods and gravity in the chain from product idea to aftermarket life has been changing and that change is accelerating. Attention is homing in on the product instance and the aftermarket. Managing the actual product instance; the car, the phone, the refrigerator, windmill, ship…. is increasing its weight in the business chain at a higher pace than the traditional processes that create products and gets them to market. No link in the chain is less important than before, they are all subject to digital innovation, but the aftermarket end of the chain is often overtaking the others in attention.

Fueling the whole chain with “visibility” is a two-way dialogue where each link in the chain feeds and consumes pieces of information.

The world is filling up with new methods and technologies for capturing data and building links in these “visibility flows” and all of those have a reason & motive but in the availability of all that new technology, don′t underestimate the role of good old ERP transaction journals. In the end one fairly critical piece of the visibility chain comes down to knowing and sharing basic facts like “what did I produce?”, “what did I produce it from?” and “how did I produce it?”. Those questions fit straight into the domain of ERP transaction journals. Those might be old technology, they might have a flawed reputation as they might be difficult to access and are only as detailed as the business process has defined them to be, but they do capture knowledge of the “what, from what, how” question straight out of the MAKE process.

In all the talk of the “digital revolution” it′s sometimes easy to forget that old principles of planning and manufacturing, in “old” technology fits very well into “new digital”.  The journey from market demand, to planning, into execution holds ample opportunity to capture product data and create visibility even in “old” technology and “old” processes. MAKE was a matter of knowing “what, from what, how” long before calling it “digital” was a career of its own.

The production order that orchestrates execution and the consequent transaction logs that book what happened can be a digital goldmine even though it′s old & uncool technology. The logs capture as much detail as the business process has been set them up to. They are in the bespoken format of each ERP and they are local to that ERP. Even so, they have the potential of providing a digital record directly from the source that can be the basis for feeding the whole chain with “visibility” from MAKE.   

Just thinking….