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Will performance trump visibility? GM, P&G, and others benefit from event management, but is performance management the end game? (source).

Article Excerpt
Shortly before a vehicle leaves a General Motors (GM) assembly line anywhere in North America, the automaker's computers send a signal to a server owned by Novi, Mich.-based Vector SCM. The computer runs an in-house-developed system christened Supply Chain Visibility Compliance, or SCVC. The system's job, explains Jim Commiskey, Vector's vice president of global services, is to provide visibility of the vehicle from the time it is produced to the time it reaches the dealer.

The signal received at Vector, says Commiskey, is the first critical part of that challenge: "It tells us the vehicle identification number, which plant it's coming from, and which dealer it's going to."

Vector, he explains, is a joint venture between Detroit-based GM and global logistics services provider CNF, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based company whose subsidiaries include Emery Worldwide and Menlo Logistics. Vector is 80-percent owned by CNF and 20 percent by GM. Its mission: squeezing operating efficiencies and improved performance out of GM's global $5.5-billion inbound and outbound logistics operations, of which more than $1.7 billion has so far been transferred to Vector's direct control. An early priority in that transferred spend--both in terms of cost savings and improved performance--was the shipping of almost five million assembled vehicles to North American dealers each year.

Once at Vector, explains Commiskey, the received signal is matched to a record specifying how each vehicle is to be transported to the dealer. Responsibility for making that shipment is then handed over to one of five rail companies, or a similar number of road haulers. Each shipper is responsible for sending out signals, in an agreed common format, as the vehicle travels though its network.

These messages are picked up by a system created by St. Louis-based Transentric LLC, a two-year-old technology offshoot of Union Pacific Railroad that offers supply chain event management (SCEM) functionality as a service. Transentric's system, in turn, forwards messages to Vector's SCVC system over its Internet-enabled value-added network (i-VAN). Here, the vehicle's actual progress toward the dealer is compared to...

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