Four Dimensions of Supply Chain – Part 3

The Corporation:

The Organisational Vision and goal determines the effectiveness of Organisational performance.  The core objective of any organisation is to customer retention and sales growth and ROI.  However, all these objectives can go wrong with wrong policies and strategies.  James MacGregor Burns coined the word “Transformational Leadership” in 1978.  The critical elements of this leadership style include positive approach with an optimistic outlook and trustful in nature and also emotionally intelligent and foster collaborative teamwork and set high expectations and nurture innovation.  These leaders transform their organisational culture by inspiring with a sense of mission and purpose.  The need of the hour is Transformational Leadership!

The strategy is one of the most over-used words in the business dictionary. But it is critical to any business success, the strategy is about making choices, trade-offs; it’s about deliberately choosing to be different.

The situation differs from Organisation to the organisation.  However, one thing is certain, Organisational Goals, Organisational Strategy and Organisational culture should be embedded into Operational Strategy.

The operational strategy could be at different levels in different organisations from lacking to Predictive.  As an organisation, it is very hard to judge the current state of Operational efficiency. Ideally, your operational strategy should include, Cost, quality, Velocity, Dependability, Flexibility (change volume, product mix, cycle time, NPI).

The core aim of the strategy should be to transform the supply chain into a profit generating growth engine through incremental value addition using predictive supply chain. It is the corporation’s responsibility to return healthy ROI to the shareholders and investors and at the same time, a safe and healthy work environment that encourages the employees to contribute to the incremental value addition and transforming the supply chain into the predictive supply chain. According to Howard Business school study, a mere 7% of employees today fully understand their company’s business strategies and what’s expected of them in order to help achieve company goals. This should change!

Some Statistical Data:

Source: IDC.

1. Visibility is the key within the organisation:
2. By 2018, 75% of manufacturers will be coordinating enterprise-wide planning activities under the umbrella of rapidly integrated business planning (rIBP).
3. By 2017, 50% of manufacturers will explore the viability of micro logistics networks to enable the promise of accelerated delivery for select products and customers.
4. In 2015, half of all manufacturers will be actively employing supply chain design and modelling technologies to dynamically assess both the demand and supply across supply chains.

Supply chain managers believe that “Business Decision Makers Lack an Understanding of or Analytics for their Supply Chain System”.  This was reported by the above mentioned CAPGEMINI study.  Further, it was reported that only 34% participants believe that the business decision makers appreciate the impact of supply chain on organisational performance, only 21% of the supply chain managers rate their systems as excellent, and 79% of the supply chain managers believe that they do not use advanced modelling techniques to inform business challenges or issues in supply chain management very often.

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