This week marks the second anniversary of SupplyChainDigest – thanks for your support. I just came back from a conference in Scottsdale this week, and by coincidence at lunch sat next to Jim Schultz of Texas Instruments, who kindly told me that SCDigest was the only thing he always makes an effort to read. We hear this all the time – thanks to all of you.

My very first column back in September of 2003 was “The Sorry State of ASNs,” and with some trepidation I am going to revisit that topic. Trepidation because as friend of SCDigest Stephen Craig of CP Consulting recently told me, the problem with most newsletters is that they quickly get repetitive, whereas (he noted) SCDigest has managed to avoid that trap.

With 50 issues a year that’s not easy, but in honor of our second anniversary, in combination with some fresh anecdotes I have heard in the past few weeks, I am going to ponder the subject of advanced ship notices (ASNs) – and lack thereof – again.

Just as a quick level set, ASNs involve electronic communication of a shipment – the receiver’s expected receipt - generally or at least most beneficially tied to unique identification of pallets and/or cartons. In the consumer goods to retail supply chain, this means a UCC 128 label, and soon (perhaps) an RFID tag. In other industry’s or close loop systems, other bar code types may be used. Historically, the ASN has meant an EDI 856 transaction, but as we’ll discuss below, there are many other options now.

The benefits are well understood: 30-40% reduction in receiving time, reduction in discrepancies and reconciliation issues, ability to preplan inventory disposition, improve cross docking, etc. We mentioned last week HP’s Ian Robertson concept of TUSC (the uninterrupted supply chain), with the goal if eliminating unnecessary dwell times. Maybe RFID will get us all their eventually, but ASNs can go a long way on the inbound side right now.

Yet, in the last few weeks, here are some stories I heard:

• A large furniture company doing ASN receiving – by getting faxes from suppliers about shipments and key entering them into their system
• A large 3PL that is not only not getting ASNs from even its CPG customers, but can’t even get pallets with bar code license plates – it charges these clients a dollar or so per pallet to label it for them on the inbound side.
• The large number of retailers importing from Asia and elsewhere not getting cartons labeled and quality ASNs on inbound goods.
• A large food company that can’t get ASNs from its own manufacturing plants.

It’s this last scenario that just continues to amaze me. I really can’t believe (please correct me if I am wrong) that a project to get ASNs and labeling capabilities in the plant would have a huge ROI from a total supply chain perspective. Yet it doesn’t happen: cost in one part of the supply chain, with the benefit in the other; always other higher priorities; a reluctance to fuss with anything in the manufacturing process.

And the effort and cost equations get better all the time. There are numerous web based tools available to capture and transmit ASN data. There’s web EDI, XML email, etc. to lower the burden of traditional EDI.

Many companies just can’t get this step done, yet RFID is going to ride to the rescue. And I’ll admit it may just be the catalyst that drives ASN flow way up, often with new systems that will be overlaid on top of existing ones.

I’ll check back on the topic on ASNs every couple of years – in the meantime, we’d love your perspective.

As we move into year 3, you’ll see a lot more coming from SCDigest soon, including a greatly enhance web site, many more educational events, and something really different on RFID. As we note nearby, we picked up the archives of the Inventory Management Report as part of our acquisition of the Supplier Selection & Management report. There’s some good stuff, and it’s free for SCDigest subscribers.

Please add us to your contacts list, and pass on to friends and peers!

Why is the use of ASNs still so low? Is there any real excuse for a company not to send ASNs from its own plants to its own DCs? Will RFID be the catalyst the makes ASNs much more prevalent?

Let us know your thoughts.