Operations Management Solutions

Companies have spent millions of dollars optimizing their supply chain processes over the last several years by placing an emphasis on process improvement techniques (e.g., Six Sigma). From transportation to procurement to manufacturing, every aspect of the supply chain has been transformed to meet more aggressive performance measurements, from "time to ship" to "turns in inventory" to "pricing and buying." All of these metrics require improvement. In order to meet these new objectives, many companies are looking to further integrate their relationships with their suppliers, shippers and customers to create a more seamless supply chain.

We call these solutions Operations Management Solutions, and they may be referred to synonymously as Supplier Portals or Partner Portals. By any name, we see an increasing interest and investment in leveraging the web to enhance these relationships that are critical to the success of the extended enterprise.

The Importance of Integration

At the same time, there has been a much heavier investment in application software to support supply chain management, transportation, manufacturing management and resource planning processes. Additionally, a corollary investment has been made in getting just-in-time information from business intelligence and reporting tools. The companies that fail to realize their investments in these technologies didn't integrate the various applications and train their employees and managers on their effective use. These siloed investments missed their ROI targets because they didn't integrate the other critical systems and just-in-time, on-demand information.

At LDS, an Operations Management Solution is a collaborative platform, a portal that provides for the integration of all of these technology and information assets and provides a framework to work more effectively with customers, shippers, suppliers and other partners and meet the more aggressive performance requirements. An Operations Portal can enhance the effective delivery of this information by aligning the assets with the intent of the user (e.g., manufacturing manager, transportation manager, purchasing manager) in a more relevant and meaningful way. This assures that content, transactions and collaboration tools are aligned in a manner that creates advantage, not clutter, on the desktops of the people responsible for making things work.

Find out more about LDS' use of portals to achieve business integration.

Portal Alignment

At LDS we see companies that adopt well-conceived, well-designed Operations Portals realize more significant return on their technology investments and dramatically advance their ability to meet and exceed their operational targets. These companies further the development of their operational partners and better manage their relationships by aligning operational objectives with their partner performance objectives and achieve the maximum output at the lowest cost. This alignment renders supply chain execution a core competency within their companies that can be described with measurable and repeatable success.

See our more in-depth perspective on partner portals.