Situation

For a large manufacturer, suppliers are key members of their team when it comes to fulfilling contract requirements and providing quality products and services to customers. Manufacturing organizations need to manage information about the suppliers of each component of their product as part of "supply chain management". Managing supplier directories, which contain contact information, repair, warranty and other overall support information, and making them available to both internal users and its customers is a critical activity for manufacturers.

However, typical systems for managing supplier information often consist of multiple databases containing duplicated, incomplete or out of date information. The process of obtaining updated information from suppliers is cumbersome, relying on customer service representatives to track down the appropriate supplier contact in order to get the necessary information. The accessibility of the information is often limited to a traditional paper document distributed to customers and internal departments.

Challenge

Manufacturers need a system that will:

• reduce the amount of time spent by customer service resources in tracking down and updating supplier information
• improve the quality of the supplier information
• enable the integration of the data set with other information products which may require the information, such as parts catalogs or user manuals
• improve the accessibility of the information for suppliers, customers and internal users

Solution

Newbook's answer to supplier information management involves our Collaborative Authoring Module together with our Database Publishing Framework.

The Collaborative Authoring Module provides secure, web-based access to a central repository of supplier information. Role-based access control supports different levels of access to the information. Supplier users who log in can access and revise only their information, while internal customer service users can review the information for completeness. The notification service of the Collaborative
Authoring Module notifies specified users via email when an update has been made, and can also remind users to periodically review their information and update it if necessary. The Collaborative Authoring Module provides a web-based, "self-serve" system with easy to use features and functionality for managing the continuous revision cycle of the information.

The Database Publishing Framework provides the ability to directly import and export information from "upstream" and "downstream" processes. This allows supplier information to be extracted from the underlying database for inclusion in product manuals and parts catalogs at the time of publishing. This ensures that data is always up to date. The framework also serves data to the web interface, which provides both the authoring interface as well as web access to the latest supplier information in the repository.

Benefits

Some of the benefits of the solution include:

• improved access to the information for internal users and customers
• reduced time and effort spent collecting updated information from suppliers and maintaining the information
• reduction or elimination of disparate data
• improved accuracy of information
• ability to link to or re-use the information in other information products such as parts catalogs or user manuals
• production of more consistent information products from a single source of data

It is anticipated that the benefits of this supplier information management system can result in an ROI after as few as 6 months; let Newbook show you how.