How to use Cradle for Supply Chain Management
Managing the requirements to product of any one supplier.
Any successful project must start by carefully managing its requirements. This follows for every link in the supply chain thus ensuring the full life cycle is efficiently and completely covered. Cradle abilities in Requirements Management and Systems Engineering supports that vital role, retaining the crucial links in managing the product’s development.
Needs, Roles, Requirements, Wants, Restrictions, Drawings.
Whatever you call the pieces of information you handle, you can create an item type to hold this information. You can categorise and add attributes and details to match your business definitions. You can add frames to hold pictures, drawings, or URLs. No need to bend your process to meet the tool, configure the tool to match your working practice.
Managing the links between suppliers
Cradle can also be used to manage contractual compliance at each level in the supply chain. That is, a customer uses Cradle to define their commercial, technical, environmental, health & safety requirements and publishes them as contractual documents.
A supplier can load these documents into Cradle, automatically parse them into their component pieces. They can then develop responses and then generate the completed response document from Cradle.
The customer receives the response documents from candidate suppliers and loads them into Cradle, automatically splitting them into their component pieces – e.g. paragraphs – and linking each supplier ‘answer’ to each of their requirements (the questions). See Document Loader. Then Cradle can help to score the suppliers’ responses.
Once a supplier has been chosen, acceptance criteria, validation methods and validations can be added to the requirements and used to manage the supplier’s fulfilment of the contract. A formal response is then produced using Document Publisher.
Whatever the level
The handy thing is that the above applies at every level in the supply chain. A company that is a ‘supplier’ in the above can use the Cradle database that they have produced to be a ‘customer’ to their suppliers, one level down the supply chain.