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Performance management: don't build your own.

Article Excerpt
It's highly unlikely that anyone looking for an enterprise system today would elect to build one using internal development resources. The functionality, domain expertise, and technological ingenuity that reputable vendors spent a decade or two building into their systems is simply more than a single company can expect to match.

By the same token, says Stanford University's Dr. Hau Lee, don't even think about building your own supply chain performance management (SCPM) solution, even though the task--at least on the surface--doesn't seem nearly as Herculean.

DaimlerChrysler Corp.'s Mopar Parts Group came to the same conclusion, and it led them to SeeChain[R], the SCPM solution from Palo Alto, Calif.-based SeeCommerce[R]. A rich set of key performance indicators (KPIs) and the ability to drive continuous improvement by means of a closed-loop, scalable solution are only two of the key capabilities that differentiate a performance management solution like SeeChain from a supply chain metrics project.

Lee, the Thoma Professor of operations, information, and technology at the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University, says enterprise systems have grown so big and complex that companies attempting to build them internally would have great difficulty succeeding. "Building a system that touches on multiple sectors of the company, like enterprise applications do, is extremely difficult. It's better to use commercial applications where the vendor has made a large investment supporting the system."

Until recently, supply chain performance management--or rather, systems that approximated to some degree the functions delivered by SCPM--was one of...

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