When it comes to using Social Media for your company’s Supply Chain Management (SCM), it’s really still an untapped resource with few companies exploiting the benefits. Some CEOs argue that the word “Social” is counter productive hence they don’t see the benefits of Social Media. Others have the “if it’s not broken, why fix it” mind set and prefer not to learn a whole new system when the one they’ve been using for years has been working fine.
What a lot of people haven’t realized yet is there are a decent amount of examples of companies using Social Media to make their SCM more efficient and less costly.
Con-way is a great example of a company who saw and took advantage of the benefits of Social Media. They utilized Twitter as a quick and easy way for Carriers to find and bid on available loads from Con-way Multimodal by following TweetLoad. Just watch the following video to see how it works.
“With this novel use of Twitter, Con-way Multimodal is leading the industry in maximizing the best features of new technology to improve their processes,” said Bill Graves, 
president, American Trucking Associations (ATA). “This is a great example of how innovative transportation companies can make it easier for carriers to do business with them, which will be a benefit to our industry overall.”
Freight carriers can now get updates every 15 minutes to available loads sent directly to their PCs or mobile phones thanks to Twitter. How they do this is, IT professionals from Con-way Multimodal designed an application that extracts key information on available loads from the company’s load board, LINK. It then uses that information to populate Twitter with individual load Tweets viewable by TweetLoad followers.
I do believe that in the next five years almost every, if not all major companies will be using Social Media for at least some part of their Supply Chain Management. It’s the way of the future….and for some, the present.
Tell me what you think about using Social Media to run a Supply Chain. Does your company already do this or is looking into doing this? Let me know in the comments bellow.
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