Ask the Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) Expert: Scheduling Assistance
 Asked on Jul 12 2005 9:18:04:000AM | Q | What has been the impact of greater outsourcing to Asia Pac on BI best practices? Sharon, San Diego |
| A | Asia Pac is becoming an increasingly critical part of enterprises global strategy, from procurement to the opening up of potentially vast markets. Companies that are developing best practice capabilities for their core business intelligence processes understand the differences in the Asia Pac marketplace from those in the Americas and Europe.
Impact for Strategic Sourcing - Asia Pac sourcing has significantly longer leads times, higher supply vulnerability and generally lower landed costs -- but less dynamic flexibility in addressing changing market requirements.
- Companies need the technical ability to access data from these remote suppliers in order to put together a comprehensive picture of the performance of the integrated supply chain -- where the real issues are, and what to do about them.
- Companies are building different metrics into their analysis, based on the sourcing region and, frequently the specific country, in order to better plan for the most likely outcomes.
- Companies have designed their processes to accommodate greater resources to handle the added risks of remote sourcing.
- For products that are more likely to be locally products such as foods, or low value products such as cement where the logistics costs from Asia Pac would be prohibitive, there has been little need to modify the BI processes.
Think Global, Act Local: Sales & Marketing - Companies have found it compulsory to partner and/or distribute through locally-owned firms. In fact, some degree of local ownership and participation is a pre-requisite to securing government approval to proceed with a local initiative. This is the case even with globally recognized brands such as Mercedes and Coca Cola, which are increasingly being licensed for manufacture in China in order to have the opportunity to sell in the China marketplace.
- Know that information from the Asia Pacific marketplace will be coming from channel partners rather than end-user customer data. If not input via an ASP / Portal interface, this data will have been captured in legacy systems and will need to be normalized before input and analyzed via traditional BI systems.
- Measuring sales & marketing effectiveness is a bit more challenging in that global companies may need to make assessments and draw conclusions from less data. Instead of accuracy standards used in North America / Europe, one should rely more on pattern recognition software to make decisions.
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