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316 Chapter 11 • Supply Chain Management

COLLABORATIVE PLANNING Collaborative planning involves a shared forecast between
business partners. These partners all have real-time access to POS information. The goal of
collaborative planning is to match production plans and product flow, thereby optimizing
resource utilization. Because collaborative planning involves input from multiple parties across
different companies, unification is difficult. Rules and deadlines need to be put in place, and a
manager must supervise the entire process for collaborative planning to be efficient. The Gem
Group, Inc. is a manufacturing company based in Lawrence, Massachusetts. They have collabo-
rated with their customer (i.e., Timberland) to produce T-shirts. Timberland has installed an
instance of a retail application at Gem Group’s site. That retail application is in turn closely
integrated into Gem Group’s ERP system. This way both companies have real-time information
about their order status, advance shipping notices, invoices, UCC 128 carton labels, and so on.
A typical example of the collaborative portal is shown in Figure 11-3. This is an example
of a commercial enterprise-level portal.

ERP System and Supply Chain
ERP and SCM today are commonly integrated in most companies. ERP focus is on providing an
integrated transaction processing that enhances organizational performance by increasing infor-
mation consistency and transaction efficiency. SCMs, on the other hand, are aimed at providing
a higher level of business planning and decision support functionality for effective coordination
and execution of interorganizational business processes. As these two systems have matured,

Employee Client Vendor SFA Calendar Other
Self-Service Self-Service Self-Service Self-Service Self-Service Self-Service

Enterprise Functionality Portal

Personallzation Collaboration Communication Security

Search Customization GUI Tools Applets Tools

Applets

Web Desktop
ERP CRM SCM BI
Content Tools

FIGURE 11-3 Example of Enterprise-Level Portal. Source: Adapted from Oracle/PeopleSoft
Enterprise One Collaboration Portal (www.oracle.com)