Plug and Play with your Suppliers
Original article date: March 1999
Before I get going, I must tell you about an email I received from a friend and reader recently, suggesting I point out that, in view of the future importance of the Internet, we should all be thinking about reserving our own personal domain names for the future. The message came from philip@philipsmith.com. He did also point out that the “Y2K” problem is in fact the “Y20C” problem, since it is the century, not the millennium, that some software allegedly cannot handle. Fair point.
Anyway, on with the show. There are two ways, as far as I see it, that a new and useful invention can arrive. Either we ask for it, so somebody gives us it, or we wait and somebody thinks of it without being asked and then surprises us.
Being impatient, I’m a fan of the former approach. There are a few things I’m aching to see arrive, and so I figure if I tell enough people they might happen. So here’s this month’s wish for starters.
With most people using compatible computers these days, some things have become more straightforward, such as using a printer. In the bad old days, every program you used had to separately know about every type of printer you might ever use, but nowadays all programs just deal with the operating system and all printers come with a driver enabling the operating system to drive it. And with ‘plug and play’, the job of installing those drivers is pretty effortless. Good old Bill.
Well, I’d like to see a day when the same was true of suppliers. If I had an MRP program which knew what stock I needed, I’d like it to be able to send orders to suppliers when things were required just like it sends output to a printer (though clearly a modem/internet link would be required). But I don’t expect every supplier to provide the same electronic interface. The process would be more like what happens with printers. I’d meet a new supplier and they’d give me a driver disk. Back at my desk, I’d click “start, settings, control panels, suppliers, add supplier”. When it asked me for more details, I’d click the “have disk” button, and insert the supplier disk.
Soon it would all be set up. Instead of “print test page?” I’d be asked “open an account?”. The OS would fill in that tedious “account opening form” for me automatically. My MRP program would not need to know about these details. It would just perform standard “deal with supplier” functions (checking price/delivery, placing orders/order chasing/being invoiced) in the same way a word processor deals with whatever printer Windows happens to have set up. In fact most suppliers would have an off-the-shelf system running their end of things, so most supplier driver disks would be pretty similar.
“But that’s not true plug and play”, I hear you shout, “It should all self configure over the internet with no need even for a disk”. Perhaps so. But one step at a time. Naturally there are a whole load of issues (including data security and authentication) to be tackled, but believe me, people are tackling these as we speak. This sort of thing will be here soon. The overhead costs of buying things will fall, and so people may be less reluctant to explore new suppliers. Big monopolies, watch out!
Suppliers who cannot manage to provide this service will trade through a virtual distributor, who will act as an electronic middleman in exchange for a small margin. Small customers will not be as expensive to service any more. Prices will be automatically varied according to quantity. The only fixed cost for an order will be the post and packing, so there may be a new opportunity for savings whereby a third party company (interconnected with all the various couriers) collects all your daily deliveries from all the suppliers in a central virtual PO Box, and you receive just one delivery daily in a big box which has your bits from everyone. Imagine that. All your electronics, pneumatics, bearings etc from loads of suppliers, all arriving at your PO Box at 6am and put in one box and brought to your door in just one delivery at 9am. With a single piece of united paperwork to book it all in!
Then again, who needs the paperwork the delivery note could have arrived electronically too. That has to be better than having TNT, Securicor, Parcelforce, UPS and whoever else turning up in a procession each morning bringing you hundreds of jiffy bags, all with different paperwork. Who knows, it could happen one day. A man can dream, can’t he?
March 1999