Smart Connected Supplier Network

Overview

Objective: 20% higher productivity of the supplier network,through fast, secure and interoperable exchange of information across company borders.

Manual data management is prone to errors

Digital collaboration in the supply chain is one of the goals of Smart Industry, the Dutch national Industry 4.0 programme. However, it is not easy to link ICT systems between companies, especially covering the supply network as-a-whole. Current practice shows that many companies solve this manually: Employees transfer information from an incoming order into their own system. SCSN is a communication standard enabling the machine building industry to share data across company borders in an easier, safer, and more reliable way.

Manual data management is prone to errors

The Dutch industry focuses specifically on the so-called low volume and high mix, high complexity machine building industry. The success of the supply chains in this industry increasingly depends on sharing large amounts of data across company borders.

Especially for SMEs that have a central role in these supply chains, receiving and sending data is not automated. This means that data received from their customers must be read, interpreted, and usually entered manually in their own ERP system. This often takes a lot of time and is prone to errors.

SCSN enables the automatic flow and processing of data. There are also strict agreements about the semantics of the messages, so that there is only one way to interpret them.

SCSN solves the disadvantages of EDI and cloud services 

Nowadays, a lot of data is exchanged between two companies via an EDI link. If a company wants to exchange data with a new partner, it will have to set up a new EDI connection. This is not necessary with SCSN. Companies must register once with an SCSN Service Provider and can exchange data with all other affiliated companies in the production chain, such as orders, invoices, technical product data, etc. It is therefore not necessary to connect to each company separately.

Using cloud connections to exchange data in between companies often means that data is stored outside the company and becomes visible to the cloud service provider. With SCSN, a company keeps a grip on its own data; it determines which data is shared with whom. The use of SCSN results in higher productivity of the supply chain through fast, secure, and interoperable exchange of information between companies.

Finally, this community of service providers and manufacturing companies is managed by the not-for-profit Foundation Smart Connected Supplier Network. This foundation is chairing the community and managing the SCSN-standard, which is published as open source standard. The Foundation SCSN is supervised by an elected Supervisory Board consisting of two manufacturing companies, service providers, sector organizations, and knowledge providers.

Benefits of SCSN

Connect once, communicate with the entire supply chain.
SCSN works for the OEM, 1st, 2nd and 3rd suppliers, wholesalers and steel producers and works with most available ERP software.
Manufacturing companies in control over their own data all the time.
Managed by an open source community chaired by a not-for-profit foundation.
Digital technologies.