We’ve never held the illusion that ACSIS or any other entity can solve the world’s supply chain challenges. For 20 years, we’ve focused on our part of that world: making supply chains more visible, transparent, and sustainable, with track and trace solutions that help supply chain managers gather new value from their data.
Supply chain management is a team sport: it takes vendors like us to run a winning play, but also squads of manufacturers, distributors, packers, shippers, component and raw material providers: the roster of supply chain players is endless. While team sports can be immersive and rewarding to play, some days just getting all the players onto the field at one time is a heroic undertaking.
That’s why we were happy to see the White House’s announcement of a “New Initiative to Improve Supply Chain Data Flow.”
March 15, the US Federal government acknowledged a role in helping the supply chain industry achieve better visibility and transparency. Quoting from the announcement linked above: “To take the first step toward addressing this challenge, the Biden-Harris Administration is announcing the launch of Freight Logistics Optimization Works (FLOW), an information-sharing initiative to pilot key freight information exchange between parts of the goods movement supply chain.”
In a crowded, dynamic, fast-growing industry that sometimes appears chaotic, we’re hopeful that this initiative will lead us towards a much-needed, standardized information hub where data can be easily and universally accessed – instead of the current “black holes” that force far too much guesswork around product status and delivery times. If the promise bears out, we will see increased supply chain resilience, better support of just-in-time manufacturing, and better-quality information for materials management and planning, among other benefits.
Like many government initiatives, the future is far from clear. We’ll stop short of predicting exactly what we’ll see spring from this announcement, when, and how much it will help. But as we’ve said, supply chains are a team sport – and a big player just stepped in to help us all towards the goal line.
Welcome to the field. We’ve been at this for a while, and we know how powerful and transformational real supply chain visibility truly is.