The Magic of the Santa Tracker System
I know that sometimes it can be deemed too early to introduce your children to some concepts, but I have been discussing shipment visibility with my son for many years now. Early on, we managed to find an internet based tracking system which would take many unknowns out of the equation for the most vital shipment of the year.
The particular solution, which is provided for all to use is http://www.noradsanta.org/ . Yes, it is the Santa tracker provided by NORAD. Now in this day and age of worry about Government bodies tracking individuals, it is important to realize that there are a lot of businesses who are actively providing information that can be used to inform all your customers. As I previously explained to my son, I am sure Santa probably has some GPS communication device which actively informs NORAD (and I am sure other important international bodies, like SHIELD and International Rescue) where he is. I am sure that what he is also very careful about is how you separate out customer shipment data from customer data. We will know where he is, but we will have no idea about who has been “naughty or nice”, only the individual customers will realize that. Talk about big data, Santa (and his Elf helpers) have been managing the incoming requests from millions of children for generations. He has the ability to change his delivery method depending on external factors (if it is foggy, Rudolph gets called in). Most importantly, he is flexible enough to understand and manage the supply chain over the last few steps (1% of the journey), is it a chimney, the magic front door key, a stocking on the bed, or over the fire, none of these will stop the optimum delivery.
So, if my son understands about supply chain shipment visibility, understands the importance to the end customers of optimizing and communicating delivery methods, why is it not seen by business leaders? Why are they not all clamoring to provide data that will allow their customers to be confident that they know the goods are going to be arriving in a safe manner, to specification, and in relation to the customer data that they have already provided to their supplier. Why are they not getting details in advance on equipment being used, who is delivering it, what the ETA is, where it is on the supply chain, how it will be managed over the last 1% of the shipment and so on? If they can do this, through tools like the ones Elemica provides across the Logistics Management suite, then their customers may be almost as excited as my son is about Christmas.