[ Solution Finder ] Retail & CPG High Tech Aftermarket Service

 

Changing Operating Environment

Organizations and government agencies are dealing with a fundamental change to the structure of their supply chain.  The combination of globalization, rapidly changing market dynamics, ever-increasing customer demands and new business models has created a radically different operating environment of next-generation business practices.

With One Network we will be able to drive our import business with higher service levels to the store while at the same time decrease the inventory holding in our network.

Direct Import Manager, Argos

The rules of legacy supply chains no longer apply.  The processes are no longer confined to your organization and completed within the “4 walls”.  Simply planning and managing supply does not meet the requirements of these next-generation business practices.  Assumptions that real-time market requirements will map to the original demand plan are seldom accurate.  And, these processes are far from a “chain” in which goods and information flow in a predictable and continuous sequence.

The rules that do apply are network-driven.  End-to-end processes such as Procure-To-Pay or Order-To-Cash fragment across a diverse network of customers, suppliers, trading partners, outsouring vendors and employees.  Dynamic operating environments are the new rule in which conditions change, often on a daily or even hourly basis, and require continuous collaboration and execution adjustments across the business network.   And, the processes are increasingly dynamic.  Product lifecycles are becoming shorter, the network of trading partners is in constant motion and yesterday’s best practices will offer no competitive differentiation tomorrow.

Legacy supply chains have grown in scope and deliver broader and far higher value to the business and to the customer.  It is a network of dynamic business processes that spans customers, suppliers and employees and manages all functions from the origin of supply to the point of consumption.

IT Solution Innovation

While legacy supply chains have undergone these dramatic changes, the supporting IT solutions have been innovation challenged.  Users have been forced into a repeatable pattern of buying more business applications, replicating systems across trading partners and bolting on visibility, collaboration or reporting systems.  After a decade of organizational change, the only real change to the supporting IT systems is that there is a lot more of it.  More applications, more middleware, more hardware, longer implementation and upgrade cycles.  Worst of all, more complexity and higher costs.

Until now.  One Network’s solution is rooted in a clear vision — these next-generation business practices can only be managed with a next-generation IT solution.  A solution that meets the needs of today’s Demand-Driven Enterprises and delivers quantifiable and recurring value across four critical layers:

• Reduce operating costs
• Improve capital efficiency
• Improve Service Level Agreement (SLA) delivery
• Reduce IT costs and complexity

One Network was founded in 2002 to create this next-generation solution and deliver more value to our customers.  Today, over 2,200 companies use our solutions to manage over $150 billion in global trade as goods and information moves from the origin of supply to the point of consumption.

Demand Driven Network Solutions

One Network provides solutions for Replenishment, Distribution and Transportation Management.  They combine a suite of robust applications, powerful software infrastructure and are delivered via a high performance global network.

These solutions are demand-driven because real-time and iterative demand management is at the heart of every high performance organization.  But being demand-driven requires much more than the development of an accurate demand projection or the ability to sense changes.  One Network has defined five critical capabilities of a delivering a lower cost Demand-Driven Network:

• Complete visibility and collaboration across the trading community

  As processes fragment across multiple organizations, real-time visibility and collaboration with customers, vendors and outsourced suppliers is an absolute must-have.

• Execute multi-company transactions with 100% conformance to policies and controls

  Legacy architectures embed policies and controls into each individual application – in today’s operating environment in which multiple organizations and applications support a single end-to-end process (like Procure-To-Pay), this creates overlapping and conflicting workflows and rules.

  One Network’s innovative approach establishes a common set of workflows, policies and controls that govern the entire process.  While legacy applications continue to play a key role in the process, each defers to a universal definition of policies and controls and a multi-enterprise transaction backbone that manages execution.

• Sense forward-most demand changes

  Today’s dynamic operating environment guarantees that forward-most demand (at the store level for a retailer or plant level for a manufacturer) is constantly changing, driven by consumer or channel variations.  One Network’s Demand-Driven Solutions constantly poll forward-most locations to sense all changes.

• Execute fully constrained demand response across global operations with zero latency

  The critical link in being demand-driven is not simply to sense a change, but rather to do something about it.  One Network polls the forward-most location and converts that information into a fully constrained operating response that calculates the impact of each operating factor shown below.  The new plan is then automatically communicated to trading partners and executed in conformance to policies and controls.

• Adaptive to multi-site requirements and process innovation

  Legacy applications impose a rigid set of process definitions that either inhibit multi-site flexibility and innovation or create needless customization expense.  One Network’s innovative architecture allows organizations to balance the requirements of central control with local autonomy.  And, as trading partners change or processes are modified, the strong foundation allows organizations to adapt to dynamic conditions.

Solution Architecture

One Network delivers Replenishment, Distribution and Transportation solutions across four key technology layers:

• ONE Global Network Applications

  One Network provides a wide array of highly functional, network-based applications that support each step in the Replenishment, Distribution and Transportation functions.

• ONE Global Technology Platform

  One Network designed and built a powerful software infrastructure that is the foundation for our solutions.  The Platform includes Development Toolkit to model processes, Controls Manager to define multi-enterprise rules and policies, Transaction Manager to ensure flawless execution, Analytics Manager for real-time performance monitoring, an innovative User Interface and Industry-Specific collaboration tools.
  Read more about Global Technology Platform

• ONE Global Transaction Network

  The core of One Network’s vision is that next-generation processes are controlled by a network of trading partners.  This challenge can not be solved by putting more software behind the firewall for each trading partner – that simply adds needless cost and complexity and creates overlapping and conflicting rules.  A network of business partners can only be optimized through a high performance global network that unites all trading partners and serves as the backbone of multi-enterprise transaction management.

• Customer’s Existing Technology Portfolio

  One Network fully recognizes that our customers have spent millions to install legacy systems. A “rip-and-replace” solution simply is not feasible.  Our Applications, Platform and Global Network co-exist with and extend the useful life of the existing IT portfolio.

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Resources

• 
  Demand-
  Driven
  Trans-
  formation
  [white paper]
• 
  SaaS 3.0: Software as a Service
  [white paper]
• 
  Service Oriented Architecture in the Supply Chain
  [white paper]
• 
  Increasing Supply Chain Visibility to
  Grow Revenue
  [white paper]
• 
  Demand
  -Driven
  TMS
  [datasheet]
• One Network’s RFID Fulfillment Network - Aberdeen Report