Well it’s official, former Hear’Say star Suzanne Shaw won ITV skating show "Dancing On Ice" and the nation must look elsewhere for its regular feast of fancy footwork and ice bound agility. Many factors all came together to give Shaw the ability to collaborate with not just her coaches, but also the music, the audience and the judges. The ability to deliver that collaboration and agility, however, depended entirely on some underlying technology – in this case the right pair of skates.

Mention agility and collaboration to most manufacturers and they’ll rightly think of the supply chain and not the ice rink. Yet the analogy isn’t that far fetched at all because manufacturers daily have to deal with agility in their collaboration with suppliers and customers up and down the supply chain. And just like Ms. Shaw, success in delivering the required levels of collaboration and agility rests increasingly on the underlying technology used within the chain.

Matt Muldoon, EMEA Senior Systems Director for Epicor explains why: “In today’s world of discrete and mixed mode manufacturing, customer requirements and the business environment are moving targets. The ability to continually modify internal business systems that interconnect not just within your own enterprise but also increasingly with those of your suppliers and customers determines your levels of agility and responsiveness.”

For Muldoon this is only achievable by using a system built from the ground up to support a Services-Oriented Architecture (SOA) based on Web technology. This is because Web services provide a simplified mechanism for connecting applications regardless of their location or the technology or the devices they use: “People often talk of Web services as a means of leveraging the Internet for low-cost communications. While this is certainly true, business is increasingly coming to recognise that the real power of Web services comes in terms of delivering the potential for supply chain wide agility.”

This hasn’t always been the case. Speculation in the early days of supply chain interconnectivity was that increased collaboration would be the imposition by large customers of preferred manufacturing IT systems down the supply chain. In which case supply chain collaboration would be little more than supply chain coercion.

In fact, the opposite has proved to be the case as Muldoon explains: “The reality is that each company within a given supply chain would greatly resist such an imposition because the majority of such companies use a particular system because it provides them with competitive advantage. Consequently true collaboration necessitates the means to engage and interact with a multiplicity of systems and technologies.”

He cites the example of a manufacturer using an SOA-based system which makes its internal systems available directly to its customer’s purchasing system, allowing the two systems to function as a single system via the SOA. “A manufacturer using an SOA-based system is therefore at a huge advantage,” he concludes, “because they are not dependent on anyone else’s technology in the supply chain to collaborate.”

One final element of agility that SOA delivers is the ability to add and integrate functionality in a highly granular fashion, as and when required. Not only does this keep costs to a minimum which enhances competitiveness, it also allows for existing workflow models to be reconfigured with minimum impact on the ongoing business operations and with minimal risk.

For the one thing that neither skating stars on TV shows nor manufacturing companies within a supply chain can afford is a costly slip-up when the pressure is on, which for the manufacturing company is every day and not just once a week when the cameras are watching.