Elemica on the right “track” with mobile app

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Every day millions of products travel across the globe to reach their intended destinations.  As customers, we dutifully check the weekly flyers or flyer apps like flipp, that showcase our local retailers and their sales for the week, without giving a second thought to the process those products went through to make it onto store shelves.  What goes on behind the closed “employee only” doors is a network of businesses and people all collaborating together to ensure YOU the customer gets the next must have item that was advertised in their weekly flyer.

This network of businesses and people form what is commonly known as the supply chain. In order to guarantee fairly smooth operations within the supply chain cycle these businesses must operate within a circle of trust.  According to the authors of the research paper Suppliers’ affective trust and trust in competency in buyers, “In order to create and maintain close relationship with participants in the SC, trust and collaboration have been considered the core factors. These two factors are important to improve SC performance as well as customer satisfaction…close collaboration among SC partner’s results in lower logistics costs, improved SC values, and enhanced service performance.”

However, is trust  and collaboration with partnered businesses enough to maintain glitch free operations in the world today?  Keeping in mind that we live in a society that thrives on social media, perhaps a healthy combination of each will provide a much more beneficial outcome for businesses in the supply chain sector.  Elemica is one such perfect of example of a Supply Chain Operating Network that works closely with its clients to ensure complete customer satisfaction through the use of social media technologies.   Charity Newsome, my customer service contact at Elemica describes the company as follows: “Elemica’s Supply Chain Operating Network enables true outside-in flexibility and market-driven supply chains, moves traditional integration and collaboration barriers, and is rapidly scalable maximizing benefit across multiple key supply chain functions.  Elemica enables companies to better sense market demand and drive more intelligent responses.  While your ERP drives savings through standardization, centralization, and increased control over internal operations, the challenge exists when you extend outside your own four walls to your external trade partners.  This is where Elemica has significant impact.”

What role does social media play in Supply Chain Management? And how does a business go about incorporating it within its logistic practices?  Ranjan Sinha shares his thoughts with us in his article Role of Social Media in Supply Chain Management ~An Interview with Jeff Ashcroft,”…now companies are embracing the platform as a way for their company to expand their reach online and tap into new revenue sources…Although a vast majority of people reference only the most popular social networks –Facebook,  Twitter and LinkedIn when thinking of social media, the true social media experience is much larger for companies. They can engage users through smart phone applications, RFID, IoT, Big Data, business social media (for sharing information between partner groups) in order to help information spread much more quickly.”  Using social media within your supply chain operations  has its perks too, such as improving communication, reducing operational and labour costs and increasing efficiency.

Elemica does this in spades with its Track Mobile App for logistics visibility.  App users can monitor shipments worldwide while providing its vendors with access to detailed information on their shipment processes.  According to their website, “Elemica Track gathers rich, quality data from across the network and presents it on mobile devices in an easy-to-view, easy-to-use format. Users can search for shipments by status – whether open, confirmed, in-transit or delivered – by order numbers, or by company name. The application provides simple navigation for shipments as users can easily swipe through pickup and delivery stops, see products and quantities in-transit, watch shipments progression, and specify desired time frame from one week to months out.”

The App is available for download via Google Play and Apple  iTunes. Elemica also shares informational videos on their website labeled ‘Elemicans in Cars Talkin’ Supply Chain‘ which provides potential customers with insights into their operations process.

Lessons for Others

With the creation of Elemica Track, Elemica’s clients like The Dow Chemical Company,
BASF, BP, Shell, Honeywell and Syngenta are making great headway in the world of Supply Chain Management.  So perhaps more companies should follow suit and embrace Social media as a fundamental tool in the Supply chain process.

Bruce Hamilton once said, “Continuous improvement is not about the things you do well ‐ that’s work. Continuous improvement is about removing the things that get in the way of your work. The headaches, the things that slow you down, that’s what continuous improvement is all about.”  Elemica is a company that takes this belief to heart, creating new ways to connect to its clients and changing the ways a company should do business “around the world”.

Please visit my other blog pages:

http://wp.cel.uwaterloo.ca/smbp/2016/02/was-quirky-a-little-too-quirky-for-business/

http://wp.cel.uwaterloo.ca/smbp/2016/02/always-putting-their-customers-first-likeagirl/

http://wp.cel.uwaterloo.ca/smbp/2016/02/hm-a-place-of-endless-possibilities/

If you have concerns as to the accuracy of anything posted on this site, please send your concerns to Peter Carr, Program Director, Social Media for Business Performance.

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