Pandemic-induced disruption up-ended supply chains and value chains far and wide, as core processes failed under the weight of material shortages, logistics problems and even the remedies to increase resilience. Supply chain industries tend to be less further along in their digital journeys than other industries and have a greater incidence of manual, disjointed processes that create gaps in the supply chain. These gaps equate to black out periods where buyers and sellers are in the dark, unable to see disruption on the horizon.
Fortunately, OpenText Active Access fills these gaps to streamline collaborative processes, create visibility across the supply chain and keep suppliers engaged and productive.
From “survive to thrive”
Take a quick look at four points in the collaborative supply chain journey and begin to imagine how Active Access will differentiate and transform your supply chain to achieve business resilience.
Set your destination
Traditional supply chains and value chains increasingly look to ecosystem models to simplify and increase the value of collaborative business. However, ecosystem success hinges on the technology’s ability to securely and efficiently connect and orchestrate the participants, processes and technologies within and across ecosystems. Be certain your chosen solution is up to the task. Also consider ecosystem aspirations in other lines of business to further monetize the value of a single investment.
Weave-in the digital foundation
Keep in mind that the return on your digital collaboration investment increases with every system, process and community the solution touches. Whether building or buying, the best advice is to strongly favor solutions built to “go sideways” across functional platforms and application stacks and are outfitted with a robust suite of APIs, including event-driven APIs for realtime monitoring and alerting and UI “reactiveness.” This includes enterprise-class Identity and Access Management built specifically to manage and scale secure ecosystem organizations and users. Workflow capabilities are also essential to filling gaps between disjointed processes, creating end-to-end, audited processes.
Show ROI via efficiency KPIs
Like any new IT investment, it’s important to demonstrate success and deliver expected value on schedule. Consider current talent consumed to manage supplier information and secure access for thousands of supplier organizations and their users. Collaboration solutions with built-in end-to-end frameworks and extensive self-service capabilities are more able to reliably shorten time-to-value while consuming less staff as shown in these three use cases:
- Workflow-driven supplier registration and enrollment: a supplier self-registration process that captures supplier-submitted data, dynamically validates against external or internal systems of record, and notifies staff of results and when to engage. If approved, automatically enrolls the supplier organization entity and its users (creates ID, provisions access). Noted improvements are:
- Reduce Cycle Time
- Cost avoidance via self-service
- Delegated administration: an end-to-end security framework that enables day-to-day user administration to be performed by internal staff or trading partner security admins, including periodic access certifications. Noted improvements are:
- Cost avoidance (e.g., time/cost: access request, approvals, [de]provisioning, attestation, password resets, etc.)
- Number of FTEs that perform the process “Manage access” (note: 2 FTE is typical for a global supply chain)
- Unsponsored contractor profiles: total per period, time to remediate
- Single portal infrastructure: a portal that connects any user to any authorized enterprise or cloud resource in the ecosystem after a single authentication event. Reduce the cost and burden to manage global suppliers and partners, eliminate redundant costs, standardize security for all external access and put an end to portal fatigue with personalized user experiences.
Create strategic value
Cross-functional teams are being entrusted with generating insights and strategies to move organizations from their “current state” to their “desired state.” Yet such teams can struggle to meet expectations, unable to discover or access relevant information locked away in siloed in functional platforms and applications. Simplify content access and retrieval across an ecosystem of IT assets and connect any internal or external team with the information they need.
Summary
OpenText™ Active Access empowers organizations to securely build, manage and connect business ecosystems to deliver streamlined enterprise services and collaborative business processes, irrespective of industry or geography. We empower organizations to increase the value of core offerings, gain operational and cost efficiencies and delight stakeholders with personalized experiences – all in a single, quick to deploy solution.
LEARN MORE
Explainer Video: Active Access: Learn how to increase the value of every customer, partner and supplier
eBook: 3 supply chain problems you didn’t think could be fixed
White Paper: Another Portal – What’s In It For Me?
1 APQC. 2022 Supply Chain Challenges and Priorities. 2022
2 EY. Why global industrial supply chains are decoupling. 2022.
