Years ago I worked for a company that made the software behind expert systems.  Expert systems are software systems that model the rules and knowledge of domain experts in order to automate and perfect the decision-making process in specific business domains.  The knowledge in an expert’s head is translated to a system that can execute, for non-experts, expert decisions consistently.  These systems were especially useful in areas where a lot of the knowledge around a process or decision-making tree was “tacit” as opposed to “explicit”.  Medical diagnostics, credit card fraud detection and fighter pilot training were all areas where expert systems took hold and succeeded.  If you could get all the knowledge in your expert’s head “into a box” and then give other workers access to that smart box, you would not only improve on individual decisions, you would make good decisions more consistently.  And there were other benefits.  Additions and adjustments to the knowledge base could be made more easily – and more sustainably – too.  If a rule needed to be tuned, or if a rule needed to be added, this could be done once, in one place, and the improvements would be made available instantly to the wider worker base across the enterprise.  This allowed companies to scale their knowledge.  And it reduced the risk of “knowledge loss” in the company – the loss of corporate process knowledge experienced when experts leave the workforce.  By putting the expert “in a box” companies gradually began to increase the knowledge capture and knowledge application that would make them more competitive.  A strategy around knowledge engineering would translate to competitive dominance if a company could successfully execute it.

Are there experts in your supply chain?  Is their knowledge tacit – locked in their heads, and not readily accessible to others?  Or has their knowledge been made explicit, so others can leverage that knowledge to make better, more consistent decisions every day?

I’ve written about the benefits of supply chain control towers in these pages before.  Deployed primarily as global visibility and monitoring systems, these systems not only enable managers to quickly locate the status of orders, shipments and inventory in motion or at rest across their complex global supply chains, they also play the role of early detector, alerter and recommender.  Perhaps more importantly, supply chain control tower systems also become data hubs, because they focus on the business transactions that occur between companies and their external partners – as well as the transactions that occur among these partners – collecting, centralizing and standardizing vast amounts of hard-to-get supply chain data.  Making this data set available to planners and analysts can reveal new discoveries and insights about opportunities in the supply chain; insights that could not have been made without the data.  Finally, these control towers play an active role in automating certain key trade and logistics processes across entire trading communities.  The technology model for these systems is a combination of applications, business-to-business network logic and infrastructure, and a globally wired data grid. What it delivers is an aggregated flow of data from thousands of underlying service providers and their systems onto a single on-demand platform, available – as they say now – “in the cloud.”  In other words, your control tower is delivered in the cloud.  It’s in the cloud because that’s where the community is already connected and working.  You leverage proven systems, electronic infrastructure and data streams from already-connected partners to build your own virtual community.

But one very significant aspect of these cloud-based supply chain control towers is that they are knowledge towers too.  They hold detailed process knowledge that would otherwise be locked up in the heads of a precious few critical knowledge workers.  In global supply chains especially, where processes, customs and work rules can vary widely, companies must find a way of capturing knowledge and making it accessible to the wider set of workers and stakeholders who execute decisions.  The threshold rules for quantity exceptions and ship window adjustments you’ve set with suppliers at origin, for example, should be captured; not just to streamline the order fulfillment process and encourage tighter compliance, but to ensure that critical process knowledge is made explicit, and that it can endure, even as your workforce and your partner mix changes over time. 

Agile companies are not just companies that can respond quickly to risk. They aren’t just companies that can mobilize quickly when they want to chase new market opportunities.  It’s that they can do these things without ripping out their nervous systems, without losing their knowledge.  They’ve invested in their knowledge systems by making tacit knowledge explicit. Today, increasingly, the best companies are doing this with their supply chain control tower systems, and they’re doing it much more quickly and much more economically, in the cloud.