USING ADVANCED SHIPPING NOTIFICATION INFORMATION FOR SUPPLY CHAIN PROCESS ANALYSIS

摘要

A product supply chain may be viewed not just as a series of discrete, unrelated shipment transactions, but as a 'process' that can be subject to statistical process control. The present invention is directed to novel systems and methods for collecting data concerning one or more aspects of a supply chain, for performing statistical analysis on the data to facilitate the identification of inefficiencies in the process. A method is disclosed that involves storing an electronic copy of an advanced shipping notification (ASN) that was transmitted from a shipping location to a receiving location in advance of shipping and also storing in memory data reflecting at least one determined value of at least one monitored aspect of the shipment.The at least one processor uses at least some information from the ASN together with a portion of the data stored in memory, to generate a report involving the determined value.