A couple weeks ago I got my attention drawn to two different events that happened at one week's interval.  The first was about the collision of two satellites in space.  Indeed, an obsolete Russian military satellite crashed into one of Iridium's communication ones.  Both satellites burst in pieces, making it even more difficult for future ones to avoid collisions.  When asked about prevention, Iridium told reporters they were dependant of NASA for their information and had not received any warning.

About a week later, another article spoke about two nuclear submarines, a French and a UK one, but each other during a military exercise.  This probably made news because both vessels where armed with 16 nuclear warheads each.  This sounds a little frightening.  Although very little information was provided on the circumstances of the incident, it was mentioned that both vessels had their sonar turned off.

You may want to ask yourself why I am bringing this up in a blog devoted to the manufacturing industry.  Well, aren't we often in the same situation as Iridium and the two submarines?  Do we have visibility of what is coming our way?  Do we have our sonar turned on?  Particularly in the current crisis, when there is a lot of variability in the system, are we spotting potential problems early, allowing us to do the required course correction?  I would dare to answer that the many cases we are in exactly the same situation as the submarines. We don't know what is coming our way.

Building our Supply Chain "sonar", requires working with the other players in the eco-system and exchange information on what happens. This can only be done if all parties understand the advantage of working together and building the visibility we talked about. Actually the benefits are even greater than just avoiding trouble. Through understanding the behavior of the supply chain, following aspects can be addressed:

• Obviously, spot problems early and react to ensure customer service levels are maintained
• Understand the "waste" in the supply chain and use lean/six sigma techniques to reduce those
• Address potential risks, which can be identified once the real operation of the supply chain is understood
• Develop simulation models allowing to experiment with alternative supply chain models , and ultimately optimize the supply chain for resilience and flexibility.

If you happen to be a member of SCMWorld.org, you may want to listen to the webinar I recorded on the use of lean and six sigma in the supply chain.

Two prerequisites are necessary to establish such approach successfully. First, trust needs to be built between the partners. This requires a different attitude towards suppliers, one that is established on a basis of a win-win approach and not an adversarial "get me the lowest cost" one. I would actually argue that this last approach often leads to extra costs somewhere else in the supply chain, and as such misses its objective all together. Secondly, an information backbone in which partners can share information securely, needs to be established. This often ends up being a barrier as the shared information is managed by a central team and partners fear leakage.

The use of emerging technologies such as Cloud Computing may actually address this. Indeed, in the current environment the information is centralized to be analyzed through a single database. The advantage of those new technologies is that they provide the capability to present distributed information as if they were located in a central database, providing the best of both worlds. Information can stay under the responsibility of the owner, who in turn can control who accesses it.

Let's make sure our companies are not submarines without sonar, as in the current crisis, maximum visibility is required to anticipate issues, take market share away from competition and be financially sound.