How They Did it: Multi-Enterprise Collaboration at Intel

This is an excerpt of the original article. It was written for the September-October 2014 edition of Supply Chain Management Review. The full article is available to current subscribers.

September-October 2014

2014 marks the 10 year anni­ver­sary of the Gartner Supply Chain Top 25 ranking. This year we have a diverse set of large, global companies with mature, demand-driven supply chains. There are lessons to be learned from these supply chain leaders, many of whom have led their industries over the past decade.

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When it came, the sign that something was wrong with one of Intel’s supply chains was not hard to miss. A key subcontractor for a particular Intel business unit was awash in excess inventory for turnkey and consigned parts. The cause? Someone had wrongly entered the required order quantity, and the subcontractor had acted on that information.

But that was simply the manifestation of the problem. The real problem was that nobody caught the problem until it was much too late—until this particular business unit (BU) owned the parts its subcontractor had unwittingly ordered. Nobody caught it because nobody knew about it: The BU had no proactive way of identifying, let alone cross-checking, appropriate purchases against actual demand. It did not have visibility.

What went wrong? That is a question those of us with supply chain responsibilities have examined at Intel reaching back at least to 2009, when my team identified a collaboration supply chain software program to address our outsourcing challenges. While putting this solution in place had to wait until a corporate-wide software initiative was well underway, rolling it out ultimately involved a broad training and certification program for supply chain planners, buyers, and managers. Along with raising the skill level and supply chain knowledge of our team, it set the stage for the collaborative pilot program that is currently in place with our partners. What follows are the steps of how we did it at Intel.

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