Lack of clear interfaces and communication between different divisions (business processes) of a company leads to loss of customers and also lead to decrease in company's performance and productivity.

For example, if a company has totally separated processes of supply chain and product development it will lead to a scenario where, Research & Development (R&D) gets some requirements specification, they would work on it as independent scientists, without considering changes in market, structure of supply, new opportunities that appear during the project (such as better components in terms of functionality, better services in terms of flexibility or cheaper production technologies).

They would not even consider most of the analogues (especially in terms of costs) that appear on the market as well as availability, costs and change that happens on the market of components of the designed products.

As a result, we had some "fresh" products, which were perfect in terms of declared functionality but useless for customers because:

• Environment has changed and costs of the production did not fit any more with product characteristics.
• Does not have appropriate channels of supply and distribution to sell the product.

The result is that we had to adopt the old ones (which was normally costly and took a lot of time) in order to fulfill customer needs. In fact, these two business processes have to be closely linked not only in terms of spontaneous information exchange, but also in terms of common decision making procedures at every step of development so as to achieve.

• Rapid introduction of new or modified products features in response to changing demand and competitor action.
• Quick formation of temporary strategic partnerships, alliances
• Interactive customer relationships.
• Dynamic configuration of production processes.
• Information integration, real time accessibility to reduces the bullwhip effect, faster response to problem.
• Flexibility in Supply Chain Management (SCM) with reference to the market condition so as to have a flexible production schedule reduced inventory, shorter lead-time and advanced levels of quality.
• Close integration in the back-end operations i.e. product design and development, procurement, production, inventory, distribution, after-sales service support, and even marketing
• To achieve, collaborative planning, material requirement planning (MRP), Just in Time (JIT), total quality management (TQM), vendor management inventory (VMI), collaborative product and forecast replenishment (CPRF)

Case study- Spin Circuit an electronic company has created a universal data network for design of data such as electronic data interchange (EDA), computer added design (CAD) libraries, enterprise resource planning (ERP) and product data management (PDM), approved vendor lists, and design data sheets, so that design engineers and manufacturing engineers can collaborate to speed up the design and the implementation process. This proves how important the linkage is between R&D and SCM to make an "Agile enterprise"

Robin C. Trehan is in charge at CBK Family and National Hotel exchange for taking the organization towards an IT (Investment Trust). He is also an industry consultant in the field of mergers and acquisitions of development companies. He can be reached at robin@cbkfamily.com