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Changing people’s minds, reinventing organizations, and altering the way we do things are some of the most difficult issues one can deal with. The process of implementing change is something that leading companies are very good at, and they use this core capability to adapt to constantly shifting market conditions.

In these organizations, the Supply Chain Executive stands out as a Key Change Agent responsible for the processes that bring together all other functions into an integrated, seamless system which collects and disseminates information, provides products and services to delight customers, and ensures making a profit. [Continue…] »

In a previous post, I was making the case that viewing the supply chain as a network of processes is the basis for rapid performance improvement.  The process centric view of the enterprise sets the stage for understanding the fundamentals of the flow processes that form a supply chain as well as identifying their performance drivers. Once the processes are analyzed and improved then execution can be automated to ensure consistently high performance.

This particular area has seen a lot of interest in the past few years from business executive sand IT professionals alike and the science of Business Process Management, or BPM has emerged to incorporate a methodology to understand, execute and improve business processes as well as the enabling technology to suport it. [Continue…] »

The Supply Chain Council, a not-for-profit trade association, developed and currently maintains the SCOR model for supply chain excellence. SCOR stands for Supply Chain Operations Reference, and is a methodology for rapidly improving operations efficiency and productivity.

SCOR is called a process reference model because it integrates the concepts of business process reengineering, benchmarking and process measurement into a cross-industry framework. The model defines the supply chain as a network of basic flow processes common to all industries and all companies, develops standard performance metrics and benchmarks, and establishes management practices and technology solutions that result in “best-in-class” performance. [Continue…] »

Despite their reputation, CEOs are not really all that hard to please. All they want is revenue growth, profitability, and a return on capital. Oh, and let’s not forget, superlative levels of customer satisfaction. As supply chain operations can definitely impact and help improve all these area of performance, the supply chain executive’s primary duty is to craft a compelling case to persuade the C-suite to invest in the continuous improvement of his or her organization. That’s what I mean by making “the case for supply chain”. [Continue…] »

Any self-respecting company nowadays has a number of initiatives on the books aimed at improving supply chain performance. The supply chain drives nearly all performance indicators of a business and has the potential to significantly improve the competitive position of the company. Unfortunately, in many instances the pressure for short-term financial results turns supply chain strategy into primarily a cost-cutting exercise for the various functional silos. Reducing expenses is always a good thing, however, a narrowly focused, cost-driven approach could have unwanted implications that may affect supply chain performance long past the current quarter, or financial year. [Continue…] »