Creating supply chain visibility : a case study on extending Intel's Unit Level Traceability to customers

In an effort to enable supply chain visibility for Intel products, the Customer Unit Level Traceability (ULT) Program was formed to help extend Intel's ULT capability to the customer level. Increased traceability of Intel products could potentially lead customers to realize some of the same benefits, such as improved issue management and security, as other industries already do. Interviewing customers regarding their perspectives on ULT and interest in pilot collaboration engagements with Intel allowed the program to realize that customer adoption would prove to be challenging. By characterizing the program with Everett M. Roger's Innovation Adoption Curve and Geoffrey A. Moore's Chasm, it was also discovered that the pragmatic early majority could not be expected to act as visionary innovators or early adopters and help the program reach a critical mass of customers with its existing strategy. However, the program may evolve to do so or at least reach its target customers by modifying the implementation plan. Rather than extending the ULT capability to customers as a risk mitigation strategy, Intel can effectively prepare a response for when inflection points occur and motivate customer ULT adoption. The timing of the adoption is largely sensitive to when customers are ready to bring on this sort of change and understanding what factors will cause this need. Ultimately, this project lends itself to the longer term, ideal state of having end-to-end traceability of Intel products along the supply chain whereby additional improvements in areas of quality and manufacturing can be discovered.

Department dc:contributor.department

Leaders for Global Operations Program at MIT

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2012

Author dc:creator

• Kang, Annie

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• David Simchi-Levi, Sara Beckman and Donald Rosenfield.

• Sloan School of Management.
• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
• Leaders for Global Operations Program.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/73404

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/73404