By John Stelzer, Director of Industry Development, Sterling Commerce
The shift to growth-oriented initiatives is causing companies to reach outside the enterprise to collaborate with others in its supply ecosystem. This multi-enterprise collaboration (MEC) is the technique by which organizations are able to progress along the path toward visible business. Its components involve the availability, analysis, and application of information to generate worth. But, the challenges of accommodating the many varied requirements of your MEC community introduce added complexities that must be addressed to accomplish and benefit from multi-enterprise collaboration.
In the last article, we turned our attention to the challenges that community introduced for making MEC a reality for your organization (i.e., community: enablement, integration, intelligence, orchestration, and management). In this final edition in this multi-part topic, we look at the typical gaps that most organizations face when trying to most efficiently and cost-effectively handle these community complexities. And, we see how most organizations circumvent these gaps with an agility strategy for the future.
REMEMBERING THE CHALLENGE AT HAND
Let’s begin by remembering the impediments that community introduces.
Enablement: Which partners will you approach in what order using what communication/recruitment method(s) to secure maximum participation? What communication and recruitment method(s) will you use to secure maximum participation, and where will you get accurate contact information? What options will be made available to accommodate varying capability levels? How will requirements be made available? How will you provision them, onboard (i.e., train, test, and implement) them, and track their progress/compliance?
Integration: What information will be made available to whom or what in what location(s) in what form(s); how will it be transported from where it is to where it’s needed; how might the information need to be converted to make sense to the recipient; and how might any of this differ from MEC partner to MEC partner?
Intelligence: What questions will you ask of what information to identify actionable conditions? For each actionable condition, who should be notified when the condition is detected, and under what circumstances will the input data to be analyzed and the questions to be asked vary from MEC partner to MEC partner?
Orchestration: In what order should which steps be performed by which resource(s) (e.g., human or technological) when based on what conditions? How might this differ from MEC partner to MEC partner?
Management: How will you:
*Monitor processes to detect errors
*Identify and resolve errors in a timely manner
*Track MEC partner performance (in terms of compliance, accuracy, timeliness, etc.)
*Notify MEC partners regarding errors, performance deficiencies, etc.
*Log historical activity data+ for subsequent analysis and reporting
*Analyze historical data for trends that require attention
*Provide the necessary security for information access, integrity, movement, and monitoring
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