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Are multiple Supply Chain objectives causing stress in the team?
I have heard from many Supply Chain teams that they are chasing several objectives. Some of these seem to be conflicting at times. They don’t know how to manage all these. How do we resolve it?
An oft quoted example is the conflict between availability, freshness and assortment. They end up focusing on one of these objectives in a month, say availability, and improve it. However, freshness and assortment scores take a beating. Next month’s focus shifts to freshness, but availability goes down. The team ends up yo-yoing between these objectives...
If you are in a similar situation where focusing on multiple objectives looks impossible, my suggestion is to first have a relook at the supply chain design, for example Forecast Driven or Demand Driven. The wrong design may be causing these conflicts.
If the design is robust, we must next look at the supply chain capabilities of demand sensing, flexibility and responsiveness. Improving these would improve all the objectives simultaneously, evaporating the conflict.