Common Operating Picture (COP) for Import Export Operations
What is a COP?
Through the course of my winding career I’ve had the opportunity to work with some of the world’s most effective operational teams, in environments and conditions where lives are on the line. Through those experiences, one of the things I’ve developed is a deep appreciation for is the organisational concept of ‘situational awareness,’ and more specifically, the technical approach of developing a Common Operating Picture or COP for short. The U.S. Army’s Field Manual for Operations (FM 3-0) defines a COP as follows:
A common operational picture (COP) is key to achieving and maintaining shared situational understanding in all domains and making effective decisions faster than the threat. The common operational picture is a display of relevant information within a commander’s area of interest tailored to the user’s requirements and based on common data and information shared by more than one command (ADP 6-0). Although the COP is ideally a single display, it may include more than one display and information in other forms, such as graphic representations or written reports.
The creation of situational awareness across teams not only enables better planning and coordination of action, but it also introduces a consistent foundation for internal collaboration and performance evaluation. This in turn improves the ability for teams to communicate more quickly around common context, while also independently drawing conclusions from the effects of individual or collective action, thereby driving operational improvements.
What does this look like for Supply Chains?
Obviously in the military context the overall purpose of this type of tool is to enable a force to achieve its objectives, and to defeat the enemy. However, in a supply chain context we might reframe the purpose of this type of common operating picture along slightly different lines. Rather than focusing on territory or population centres, in a logistics context we might consider independent factors like weather, port congestion, or carrier-route performance, and how they contribute to KPIs like Detention and Demmuarge fees, customer experience, or shipping time. The critical factor is that information is broadly distributed across the organisation, and that the ‘effects’ of decisions are immediately and transparently available to the entire organisation, rather than each individual relying on siloed information.
Consider the following three scenarios that Bolster’s Logistics COP solves for our users:
- Which shipping lines tend to perform poorly on which routes, so that I can book the best option?
- How many shipments do we have waiting in the Panama Canal, and how long is the delay likely to take?
- Which ports are experiencing higher than normal congestion, and what options do I have for rerouting?
Unlike a typical ERP setup that requires a written request to the Business Intelligence (BI) team to eventually produce a lacklustre, dated and static report, our logistics users are free to directly observe and interact with the data in order to draw their own conclusions in a very agile, flexible, and low friction way. Overall the organisation experiences a ‘lift’ in situational awareness, which creates significant downstream efficiencies, and makes the entire organisation move faster.
Improve Situational Awareness at Your Organisation
To quote Mohammed Ali, “The hands can't hit what the eyes can't see”. Are you a leader at an organisation that imports or exports, and perhaps looking for ways to better support your logistics teams with access to relevant, high quality and actionable data? Reach out for a free trial and demo of Bolster to see your import/export operations in a totally new way to create shared understanding, and win.
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