Most manufacturers today operate in a global marketplace that moves and changes very quickly. That's particularly true in the high-tech, automotive and household-goods sectors, where fluid marketplace dynamics are creating some tough supply-chain challenges. Increasingly, traditional, forecast-driven supply chains are hindering manufacturers ability to respond to the market, causing them to lose sales and weakening their competitive positions. Yet manufacturers can't afford the investments in internal staff and systems required to manage and enhance supply-chain performance. To get out from between this rock and a hard place, many leading manufacturers are applying managed services to new levels of the business community. Specifically, they are moving beyond outsourcing just their basic connectivity and data-exchange capabilities to outsourcing their community management and performance-management functions, too--thereby getting far more bang from their managed services buck.

This White Paper will examine the supply-chain problems now confronting manufacturers, the benefits of managing supply-chain performance more effectively and the risks presented by some efforts to achieve those benefits. It also will look at why many manufacturers rely on the Inovis managed services solution, which combines proven technology with a shared business-process orientation to deliver speed, flexibility and lower costs.