From Gaps to Wins: How to Build Supply Chain Visibility That Lasts

In this episode of Supply Chain Visibility Stories by ACSIS, host Bill Wohl speaks with John DiPalo, Chief Strategy Officer at ACSIS, about the real challenges companies face when bridging the gap between ERP systems and true supply chain visibility. Learn why internal transparency matters before tackling external complexities, how to identify quick wins, and why a cross-functional team is key to long-term success.

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Narrator:
Welcome to the Supply Chain Visibility Stories, the podcast for supply chain managers, brought to you by ACSIS, the 100% supply chain visibility cloud solution provider, Supply Chain Visibility Stories is hosted by Bill Wohl, a technology industry veteran and enterprise software professional. 

Bill Wohl:
Thanks, everyone for joining us. Today marks the next in a series of discussions exploring a variety of business-related topics with a focus on the intersection of technology and business. Our focused discussions are designed to be brief. We hope that will allow you to be engaged in this podcast and inspire our audience to think about how technology impacts your own organizations and to engage with us as the series continues. I'll have information about how to engage with the series and our guest at the end of today's discussion. My name is Bill Paul, and I'm honored to be the host of this series brought to you by ACSIS. I've been working in the technology sector since the late 1990s, including 11 years at SAP. So, I'm always fascinated by the business challenges faced by companies and how those challenges can be addressed by technology. We started our series talking about some of the macro trends that are facing companies today and, interestingly, really talking about the impact of the pandemic and how that's brought forward a renewed focus on global supply chains. And we've been slowly through this series, digging a bit deeper, and that's what we're going to do today with our guest John DiPalo. John is the Chief Strategy Officer at ACSIS, which is of course a leading technology player in the supply chain space. So John, welcome back to the program.

John DiPalo:
Thank you Bill. Appreciate it. Thanks for having me back.

Bill Wohl:
So we've been talking a little bit about this increased focus on supply chain, and I know a lot of companies listening have spent a good deal of time and probably money investing in back-end systems. And the promise of course, was to organize their understanding of their business process and workflows, including supply chain. But we understand from the previous discussions there's still some pretty big gaps out there, and as the science of supply chain has moved forward, the promise of learning even more information and gaining even deeper transparency has really come to the forefront, especially in the last 18 months or so. I think, ultimately, customers are left with the urgent question, how do I get started? So, let's talk about this. You council with a lot of customers in thinking about this issue. What are some of the things that customers need to think about as they start to roadmap their next supply chain journey?

John DiPalo:
Well, you know, it's interesting because there's a lot of dimensions and a lot of areas that we could go into because it's a very complex subject. There's a lot of complexity in today's supply chain, multiple layers of suppliers, multiple routes for product. And the main challenge or the one challenge that I see many companies have today is how do I start this journey? How do I begin to take a look at what's going on and get a handle on things? Because it's a big task. And I think that the reality is that companies today need to start to take a look at how can I build or look at this and take it in bite-sized chunks. Right? So, I want to be able to look at my supply chain, understand where the challenges are, divide it up into things that I can accomplish quickly, get quick wins, get the company and the stakeholders on board, and then evolve that out over time. So, you know, it's not a boil the ocean strategy, you know, look at everything and try and fix everything at once. It's really more around how can I just connect a bunch of winds in order to start to get better visibility and control over my supply chain.

Bill Wohl:
So that makes sense and it's you know, amazingly similar to what we talked about in the 80s and 90s and 2000s when people were rolling out ERP kinds of projects and the council to customers was don't do it all at once. Don't do a big bang implementation. So understanding that as you think about the peace parts of that journey, what are some of the factors that customers are thinking about when they try to plan out this project? 

John DiPalo:
Yeah, it it's interesting because I think when companies first get into it, they tend to look at it in a vertical fashion, meaning that, you know, this silo does this process and and you know, let me look at how I receive product or how I manufacture product or how I distribute product. And I actually think the right way to look at it is to look at it from a horizontal perspective, right? So, how can I start to connect the pieces that are currently disconnected in order to streamline my internal processes first and then quickly look towards my external processes to see how I can harmonize all of those as well. So it's a journey that I think needs to start from the inside out because we work with many many companies today that have spent significant money on their ERP implementations and have very good processes built into their ERP systems but the connectivity to what's actually happening on the floor as product moves from their receiving dock as an example through manufacturing out through distribution is not necessarily connected at a process level to what needs to happen to give them visibility in their ERP. And once you start to look at it from that dimension, a lot of things, you know, come to the forefront of areas for improvement and areas that I can look at from a product movement perspective, from a product traceability perspective. In order to get that information into my back-end business systems in a much more reliable way in a much more way that provides more value to the organization and in a way that I can now start to analyze what's actually going on and see where my products are moving and where the bottlenecks are in those processes.

Bill Wohl:
So it sounds to me like companies have done generally a good job at established business process. Now the challenge is understanding within the process, does the transparency exist on whether finished or partial goods or even component parts are visible to the process at each step along the journey. Is that right?

John DiPalo:
Yeah, I think that's a good observation of you know where things become challenging, and sometimes what you need to do is you need to get external from those processes, right? So having you know a known partner or you know somebody who looks at things a different way, come into your organization, take a look at how things are running, where the value points could possibly be and bring a different perspective certainly will help in your journey. And then once you do that, you can start to think about okay, how do my external partners work within that entire ecosystem and how can I bring them into a collaborative effort in order to continue to widen not only the view of my supply chain but it's operational efficiency and provide more value to all partners across that network.

Bill Wohl:
So you talked a little bit about the tension between fixing things internal and then fixing things external, even if your gap analysis identifies big problems outside. Does it make sense for companies to really get their internal house in order before they tackle obvious problems downstream of their own loading dock?

John DiPalo:
I think you can start to focus on both areas, but you know, it's amazing to me how many times that I go in and and walk the floor of a location and when you talk to the stakeholders about that process and then you physically go and see that process, there's often two different results. So even if you're running smoothly internally, you know, and you think you have all the efficiencies squeezed out of that. There's still a task that needs to happen which is kind of giving your products your eyes and ears as they kind of move through what their journey is because it's amazing what you will start to uncover and then when you start to think about how can I take those individual processes streamline them get a more granular view as what as to what's going on across my internal supply chain you're also going to start to identify where the challenges exist externally that are causing potentially some of those bottlenecks or nonvalue added processes that happen every day in you know businesses today as as they manufacture and distribute products.

Bill Wohl:
So to make it real for our audience, can you give an example?

John DiPalo:
So you know there's probably a lot of examples, but I was on a shop floor tour of a major beverage company and we were talking through the process and I was working with a very long-term employee who had become a manager and he was telling me what the process was as product flowed into the manufacturing center to be palletized and and shipped out the door and all of a sudden out of nowhere there came a pallet of product that was inserted into the line after the point that we were expecting to capture the data for that.

And I turned to my host, and I said,
"What was that about?" And he says, “that never happens. That must have been an exception.”
And the gentleman who was actually running the line turned to both of us and said, “that happens 10 or 20 times a day.” So the reality is.

Bill Wohl:
That doesn’t sound like an exception.

John DiPalo:
No, it wasn't an exception. And if we had designed the business process and the shop floor execution process based upon just a discussion versus a phys physical examination of what was actually going on, we would have missed that exception and then we wouldn't have in a system that was really capturing what was happening, you know, in real time on the floor. So, it's just a little example. It happens all the time. We see it over and over and over again.

Bill Wohl:
In our last segment, one of your colleagues talked about the fact that an external process was impacting an internal process. In that case, it was in he baking industry, and the products have to go on certain types of trays, but the process of tray return was actually holding up manufacturing because of a shortage of trades. So I assume one of the challenges to getting started is doing a bit of a gap analysis to try to figure out where are the biggest problems? And where are the potentials for the supply chain to get stuck or to fail simply because at some point in the chain there can be a breakdown?

John DiPalo:
Exactly. And you know, I think when you look for those larger issues. The challenge and we may have even talked about this in a previous podcast, but the challenge is not to solve them in a standalone fashion. The challenge is to look at holistically, how by solving this problem, can I build a foundation for other things you know on both sides of that particular issue that you are solving.

Bill Wohl:
What are the kinds of people that need to be on the project team to sort of understand the skills required to undertake a project like this?

John DiPalo:
Yeah, Bill, that's a great question, so the way that I like to think about it is you really want a cross-functional group of people. So you certainly need to have input from it, supply chain IT. You need to have a strong executive sponsor, but you also need people on the team who work the processes on a daily basis that you're looking to solve, right? Or improve because that team is the team that is going to tell what's really going on. But equally important, that is the team that is going to take that message forward. And if we do a good job and that team is happy about the results of that, it's much easier to do the follow-on work with additional teams that are working in different areas. So those those practitioners that work with the processes on a daily basis are vital for the success of any of these types of projects.

Bill Wohl:
Solving transparency out at the edge then requires people out at the edge who live it every day to be part of the process, right?

John DiPalo:
That's a great way to look at it.

Bill Wohl:
So, let's wrap up today's podcast just sort of with a final question, which I think takes us back right to the beginning of our discussion today. John, what's your best advice about the most important things to think about in starting a project like this?

John DiPalo:
I think my advice is get the right team on board, look where you can achieve quick wins, and then promote those wins across the entire organization because that's how you're going to get the next win and the next win and the next win.

Bill Wohl:
That makes good sense and it's great advice. John, as always, thanks for having you on the broadcast.

John DiPalo:
Thanks, Bill. Appreciate it.

Bill Wohl:
That wraps up today's podcast. My thanks to ACSIS's John DiPalo for joining and for and to the folks at ACSIS for making this podcast series possible. We welcome your comments and questions about the discussions on these podcasts. You can engage with us at the official ACSIS Twitter and LinkedIn accounts. And I know John would welcome the opportunity to talk with you and answer your questions. So, please join that discussion. I'm your host, Bill Wohl. And for everyone at ACSIS, thanks for joining. We look forward to our next podcast. Talk soon.

Narrator:
Thank you for listening to Supply Chain Visibility Stories brought to you by ACSIS, the 100% supply chain visibility cloud solution provider. Visit us on the web at acsisinc.com. That's acsisinc.com or join the dialogue on social media. Look for ACSIS Inc. on LinkedIn and Twitter. Join us next time for supply chain visibility stories brought to you by ACSIS.