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Smaller companies missing out
September 2008
When businesses talk about improvements in the supply chain, they tend to be larger enterprises celebrating their own successes.
Managers of smaller companies could be forgiven for thinking they bear an unfair proportion of the costs of a supply chain project, yet enjoy few of the benefits.
Even the language used – talk of supply chain or RFID (radio frequency identification) “mandates” – reinforces the notion that supply chain efficiency gains are at the expense of, rather than to benefit, smaller businesses. The high cost of some supply chain technologies does little to help.
“The difference between small and medium businesses and large corporations is that small and medium companies are always responding to large companies’ requests,” says Kevin O’Marah, senior vice-president at Boston-based industry analysts AMR Research.
“Another important difference is that large corporations invest [in supply chain management] and apply it to the entire corporation,” he adds. “Smaller companies will attach a business benefit to the deployment if it is attached to a customer, but they won’t take as much of a long-term view or make the complex investments in IT that larger companies can.”
Responding to this research, Kevin Vaughan, Business Development Director at SerCom, suggests that SerCom Solutions can give small companies a 'world class', Supply Chain Management solution which will not cost them lots of money. SerCom's systems and processes can be integrated into the customers IT platform, giving them advanced solutions, allowing the customer to concentrate on their core activities of selling, product design, customer management etc. SerCom Solutions runs SAP.