Supply Chain Sarbanes Oxley Supply Chain SarBox Supply Chain SOX Supply Chain Corporate Governance Supply Chain Integrity

One of the greatest inhibitors to effective management is basing decisions on faulty information. Information must be collected accurately and on a timely basis, and that information must be communicated accurately, on a timely basis, and in a format usable by the person receiving the information.

Very often sensitive information is retained in personal documents and spreadsheets on unprotected computers. Typical reasons are due to either real or perceived business application (i.e. Enterprise Resource Planning system) deficiencies. This information is subject to being incorrect and may conflict with information in a business application. Worse, an attempt to compare similar information from these two distinct sources is likely to reveal discrepancies and force people to spend time reconciling the differences, or scraping what should be the trusted source (the ERP system, for example) for the other source (the personally maintained spreadsheets or documents).

And it is too often that the reasons for a person retaining unprotected information is that they have either not been adequately trained on the business application or that no one has bothered to determine if the user's need were valid or invalid and, if valid, how to provide the user with a trusted (technology) tool to use. This unfortunately can and often does cause job frustrations due to the inability to work efficiently.

The inability to communicate accurate and timely information throughout the internal and external supply chain can cause:

Raw material purchases to be too much, too little, or too late.
Finished goods manufacturing to make too much, too little, or too late.
Inaccuracies in supplier scorecards.
Meaningless data to customers and sales representatives.
Executive management to make strategically bad decisions and miss market opportunities.

The users of information should not have to hunt for good data or question the integrity of the data source. The right information needs to be communicated to the right person in a timely manner so that the person can make an informed, trusted decision, no matter at what level of the organization the person works.