09.21.07

When I’m not on an airplane, I can occasionally be found leading a Cub Scout Den. Tonight, for instance, my Webelos played a game using compasses to navigate back and forth a circle of hundred feet in diameter. At each point in the game. The boys were given a compass bearing, which should point across the circle to a letter, which they would walk to. After reaching the letter, the boys would take a new bearing that you point them back across the circle to a different period. The game is won by getting six letters in the correct order on the basis of the compass bearings. What is interesting about this game is that you must do it one step at a time because you need the context of your last step to determine where to go next. The other interesting part of this game is that errors are cumulative, so once you’ve made one mistake, it’s likely contribute to downstream mistakes. As an example, some boys might start at the letter A. The first compass bearing is 32, which should take them across the circle to the letter X. However, some boys make a mistake and wind up at the letter L. This means their next bearing which might be 225 will be from the wrong point, increasing the likelihood of an error. You get the point. Since I want the boys to complete successfully, I periodically check their progress and help them correct mistakes. For the kids, this is actually a form of visibility or continuous business activity monitoring, although I doubt they thought of it this way.

The supply-chain business is very similar to this game in some ways, particularly in the compounding of mistakes. As new products or promotions are rolled out, some errors in forecasting or other planning creep in, and roll forward! At each stage in the process, there is a chance to either make new mistakes or compensate for old ones. You don’t need to worry about making new errors, that happens automatically — but compensating requires continous feedback. Since there are many participants in a typical supply chain, the feedback system that is most critical these days is “continuous visibility”. The idea behind continuous visibility is to leverage the many “signals” (sometimes called demand signals, although sometimes signals on the supply side are critical as well) being sent between participants in a supply chain to figure out what is happening — with an eye toward improving the situation. Vendors who specialize in this space are usually categorized as BAM, or business activity monitoring, vendors. But putting a complete system like this in place is not for the faint of heart, as it combines the toughest challenges of EAI and B2B into a single task — and then requires it be done in realtime to be worth doing at all! Having said that though, there is a path to follow that leverages the combined strengths of modern systems and existing assets. A good approach is to focus on detecting and managing events occurring in the supply chain, and correlating the events to detect patterns. Most BAM tools have great functionality in this area, and the younger market category of CEP (complex event processing) software is also very promising. But, sadly, most vendors assume you have a clean event stream to start with — which is rarely the case… In the B2B world, the document is king. Overwhelmingly the document is based on a standard like X12 or EDIFACT, but XML based standards are just as helpful here. Turning documents into events is a good way to get a basic monitoring system in play, and there are several ways you can go about it. Many high end EDI translators (including GXS’s Application Integrator) are capable of generating multiple files per document in translation (Application Integrator now generates an XML “meta-data” file by default, whose content is configurable), and they are also usually of accessing databases or making web service calls (but you have to watch for performance degradations, as these packages are very highly tuned for their core semantic processing tasks). The extracted data can usually be submitted to a BAM/CEP system using either asynchronous messaging or web services. Some B2B solutions, like Microsoft BizTalk, incorporate BAM capabilities directly into the package. If a company exchanges a complete suite of documents (from Order through Remittance Advice), events generated from that create a skeleton of supply chain activity that can be “fleshed out” through integration to other systems via traditional EAI or possibly web services. This is usually quite a bit more challenging than working with the documents, but also potentially lucrative since at this point you tend to have a good idea what kind of information is required. Within the GXS Trading Grid, we tend to generate events whenever we handle data, and then augment that activity with events “fired” from our key infrastructure and application services. Leveraging our centralized ESB (enterprise service bus), we can aggregate information flowing through it. In fact, a major focus continues to be generating ever more events to the “bus”, and making it easier to “see” what is going on. The patterns and practices for doing this emerged from work in our Managed Services environment, where we can achieve visibility into literally millions of documents that we manage — and we did it exactly the same way, starting with the documents and then integrating key systems one by one. Without a strong feedback loop in your supply chain, you might find yourself outpaced by former Cub Scouts who check their bearings often…