The book The New Supply Chain Agenda (Harvard 2010) outlines an excellent strategy to help companies achieve supply chain excellence. This book also has some very effective self surveys to help companies identify the current state of things concerning their own supply chain operations. However, I like to keep things simple and wanted to share a way a company could use the highlights of this book do a quick 30,000 foot self survey of their respective operations.
The supporting website of The New Supply Chain Agenda outlines five pillars the authors (Dittmann, Slone & Mentzer) say must be mastered for a company achieve operational excellence. So companies that want to measure their own supply chains can simply rank themselves against these pillars along with the supporting definitions given by the website.
THE SUPPLY CHAIN SELF TEST
Rank your supply chain on a scale from 1 to 5 to (one being very unsatisfied and five being very satisfied) to understand how you feel about the current state of things.
Talent is the first of the five pillars to drive supply chain excellence. If you don’t have the right people in place, you can’t build an appropriate strategy and you certainly can’t execute it. Finding talent for supply chain positions has unique challenges due in large part to the cross-functional and cross-company process challenges faced by supply chain executives today. RATE: 1 2 3 4 5
Technology is always critical, but the real key is making sure you choose the right supply chain technology and successfully implement it. Improperly understood or implemented, technology can cause severe damage rather than improvement. You must be careful in how technology you select and apply the latest supply chain technologies, especially given the extremely complex nature of today’s global supply chains. RATE: 1 2 3 4 5
Internal Collaboration involves each function in your firm playing a critical role in a successful supply chain; and will help you develop a clear vision for how they can work together to achieve supply chain excellence. In the book, there is a self assessment you should complete to honestly evaluate your process for aligning the demand and supply sides of the firm. RATE: 1 2 3 4 5
External Collaboration focuses on how your company can achieve break though results by collaborating externally with both your suppliers and your customers. Best practices for collaboration exist and are being applied by more and more firms. RATE: 1 2 3 4 5
Managing Supply Chain Change addresses the last but equally critical pillar of a supply chain excellence strategy. Everything else is for naught if you don’t execute successfully. You need to learn how to increase your chances of success on the path to supply chain excellence. Because of their cross-functional, cross-company nature, supply chain projects are more difficult to implement than those in other functional areas. RATE: 1 2 3 4 5
Doing such a self inventory gives companies the chance to identify if a deeper dive is necessary. More importantly, what can come out of these kinds of evaluations is a roadmap to a future desired state and all the benefits that come along with that.
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