Enterprise 3.0 In The Supply Chain: GT Nexus Cofounder Greg Johnsen (Part 6)

Sramana: How do you message around building a centralized platform that shares supply chain business objects among multiple parties? How do you communicate security and collaboration concurrently?

Greg Johnsen: This past year we have had a shift in how we talk about the company during our second or third meeting. You can’t do this in the first meeting, but we have the experience of sitting down with the CIOs of some of the 3PLs. They have gone and seen customer implementations and several hours of demos. They understood the space and the processes and knew that we had a good supply chain visibility platform with alerts, triggers, and control points.

It was not until we were in front of whiteboards drawing the organizational schema and showing them that a user inside of one division can participate in the private logistics network of one company but also participate in the network of another company that it became clear. Every user and every organization is on the GT Nexus platform just once. In that respect the platform is a lot more like a Facebook.

Sramana: It is like Facebook except you put in all the security features you just talked about, such as permission control.

Greg Johnsen: Exactly. With extra strong and rich permission control. We are dealing with hundreds of processes and sensitive purchases and supply chain data. That is a core technology element that is the center of our platform. We could have done it 15 different ways but we chose this method intentionally. It is complicated. There are business issues for partners that bring their customers aboard.

Imagine the angst that a major 3PL would go through bringing aboard a prized customer. They are bringing their customer into a platform where that organization could immediately connect to one of their competitors. That is hard thing to get past. We had to make some trade-offs in terms of strategic product marketing vision. We had to hold out. It would have been easy to sell software and services to make money, but we didn’t do it because we believed that the end game was about creating a Facebook-like platform for supply chain. It is an example of making tough choices and taking on risk in order to go for something more strategic that you believe in.

Sramana: From a product marketing point of view you have taken the perspective that you are going to design the system on a user-centric architecture and create a centralized platform, a concept that did not exist in the industry.

Greg Johnsen: Yes, I would even say that it is more of an organization-centric platform. It is users inside of businesses and divisions, but the business rules and processes rarely get down to the individual level. Typically, the business works in a way that you grant DHL access to a line of purchase orders. We do have the ability to go to the user level, but operationally it is used down to the division or department levels of companies that collaborate around a single supply chain business aspect.

The good thing about supply chain cloud is that it enables new information models. The example we use is the address book. Everyone still has an address book on a PC. If you change your cell phone number and update that in my address book, it does not benefit my friends because the update affects only my computer. The thing about our business model is that updates are centralized. That is what we have done in supply chain for every business object. A single change to a purchase order is visible to everyone who is supposed to be able to view that purchase order.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Enterprise 3.0 In The Supply Chain: GT Nexus Cofounder Greg Johnsen
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