Improve your supply chain

Complex Challenge

Achieving this kind of supply chain excellence is obviously beyond the scope of any one organisation. It requires a coordinated approach by all stakeholders from business, industry, union, education bodies, and government.

That’s because there are major challenges to achieving supply chain excellence. They include key supply chain players worldwide forming new strategic alliances and the emergence of new business models. Then there are new technologies like RFID and wireless local area networks driving new production and distribution models such as online purchasing and delivery.

The overall freight task is growing itself while Transport, Distribution and Logistics (TDL) operators are also coping with increased fuel prices and the need to ensure supply chain security. It’s a rapidly evolving and increasingly complex task. But, achieving supply excellence puts you ahead in the global marketplace.

Victorian Initiative

The Victorian Government is taking on all these issues as part of its strategy to keep growing Victoria as Australia’s State of Supply Chain Excellence and Gateway of Choice. This approach is based on the recognition that a unique integration of strategic thinking, planning, and new technologies and skills to harness TDL resources and infrastructure is central to meeting the fast-growing diversity of customer needs. In short, ensuring that everything is linked.

So the Victorian Government is improving the overall supply chain environment through the framework of its TDL Industry Action Plan, and the 2006–2009 Supply Chain Excellence Action Plan. These are both government-industry partnerships focused on issues like infrastructure and technology, education and training, regulation review, and supply chain efficiencies.

This covers projects such as the Business Activity Harmonisation Study to reform operating hours at the Port of Melbourne, Australia’s largest container port, and the TDL Specialist Centre, and the National Intelligent Transport Systems Centre.

This industry–government partnership has also been active in developing the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) capabilities of supply chain companies. Over the last few years a special reference group has actively supported the development of ‘smart freight’ and completed a major Transport Company Benchmarking Study. This study benchmarked how 56 transport companies use ICT systems, within their company and with other companies along the supply chain. The reference group is now focussing on streamlining transport payments through improved ICT systems.

New Ideas

Victorian Government initiatives such as the Supply Chain Capital Program are also working to directly improve performance among separate companies linked by common supply chains.

For example, Australian Vinyls Corporation (AVC) piloted new e-commerce technologies in Victoria with supply chain partners, interstate road transporter, Fred’s Transport and plastic pipe and PVC products manufacturer, Vinidex. Through the project, they developed an integrated information flow that allowed their systems to electronically talk to each other, and achieve what is known as System Interoperability. This improved monitoring of stock levels across the supply chain and eliminated double entry of data between trading partners, delivering time and cost savings to keep AVC competitive against imports. It also cut nearly in half the time customers needed to reconcile supplies in-transit, and delivered over multiple plants, which dramatically improved the management of raw material and production scheduling.

Another example was the Mercury Communications Group trailing the innovative new print-on-demand system Booksurge, to print and distribute specialist academic monographs under commercial conditions. Mercury’s supply chain partners were the project’s print data management company, Thorpe Bowker, and academic publishing house, Melbourne University Publishing. It can take more than three weeks for books to be shipped from the United States or Europe, even when they are in stock. But advances in digital printing, managed by a system like Booksurge, means books can be printed as needed in the country where the order originates. Printing on demand cuts delivery times and inventory, and allows improved electronic ordering, as well as copyright and rights reporting management.

Mitre 10 also developed a new supply chain approach through the Supply Chain Capital Program to improve efficiency in the distribution of timber intended for house construction.