CIO and IT Leaders

Business and Contract Manufacturing Challenges for the CIOs and IT leaders

For the typical product / brand owner, material supplier or contract manufacturer, today’s mixed production model of internal and outsourced manufacturing of product creates massive connectivity, coordination and data challenges. Your company is connected to hundreds of other companies, sharing information (procurement, production, material supply, quality, etc.) between multiple business systems, connecting virtual teams together and reporting out how it is all doing. So on whose shoulders does the burden of making this all work smoothly and securely fall? The CIO and IT organization!

The business owners from manufacturing, supply chain, business development and other functions need better information, they need it now, and they need it in a form that is actionable. The problem is that you as the CIO or IT leader are facing a nightmare of interoperability issues. Why?

1. You have multiple enterprise systems with parts of the answer.
2. Your numerous external manufacturing and supply partners also have multiple systems with parts of the answer.
3. The external supply partner network that you need to connect to ranges in sophistication from SAP ERP down to spreadsheets and email systems.
4. Each of these external partners has tens to hundreds of their own contract supply relationships to contend with besides your own.
5. Setting up portals or B2B links one-by-one is costly and time consuming with very little success of adoption by your partners.

We call this the “many to many” problem and it often stops your business from truly connecting to and collaborating with your supply network, particularly the “long tail” supplier and contract manufacturer that can bring in the unexpected business opportunities. As a CIO, solving this problem will enable you to drive ROI from IT investments and solidify your position at the executive table as a business leader and not just a technology provider.

How TraceLink can help the CIO and IT leaders with Contract Manufacturing challenges

• Improve connectivity and collaboration with contract partners. Establish an “integrate once, inter-operate with everyone” external supply interface that allows you to provide business owners with the ability to collaborate on business processes equally well with Tier-1 and “long-tail” contract partners. Reduce your burden in managing these hundreds of connections by empowering your business owners to reach out and connect to virtual team members as needed.
• Support Right-First-Time predictability and scalability of contract manufacturing production. Enable your business owners to access integrated cross-partner and cross-site visibility into production status to improve decision-making, improve information sharing between internal and external work teams, and empower contract partners to help drive process improvements through improved sharing of forecasts, process artifacts and milestones.
• Reduce your organization’s burden in providing metrics and analysis of data. Enable your business owners to do their own monitoring and assessment of contract partner performance and overall external supply performance against established KPIs.
• Improve IT agility in responding to new business opportunities. Enhance your company’s ability to access new kinds of data and direct it to the appropriate business user. Shrink the time needed to get ramped up with a new contract partner. Reduce the time to adjust internal and external lines of communication based on corporate reorganizations and new company acquisitions.

Next steps

• Try It Yourself.  In minutes, launch a no obligation FREE TRIAL of our Predictable Supply Suite. Create your own Process Link collaborative team workspace, invite and quickly connect to virtual team members, then experience a new world of production visibility and tracking across your contract manufacturing operations!
• Demo Production Tracking.  Request a guided PERSONAL DEMO of our Production Tracking and ProcessLink solutions. On your schedule, one of our team members will take you through our solution.

Explore More

• Discover Production Tracking.  Find out how the TraceLink Production Tracking solution can give you visibility and control throughout the entire contract manufacturing lifecycle. Go Production Tracking
• Experience ProcessLink.  Review TraceLink's innovative approach to connecting you and your internal contract manufacturing teams to your partners both fast and flexibly. Go ProcessLink