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Are we questioning the various assumptions made in Supply Chain design and execution?
Supply chains run on several assumptions that we need to make from time to time. A few of these are explicit, while most of them are implicit assumptions at the time of designing the supply chain.
The context in which supply chains operate changes over periods of time. Do we review the assumptions when the context changes? If we fail to do it, supply chains will perform poorly and tweaking the parameters just won’t work. I have seen most supply chain teams struggling continuously with firefighting operations.
If we want to stop these fires, we must redesign the supply chain and the starting point is reviewing the explicit as well as implicit assumptions. It’s not an easy task as many of these would have become industry practices and possibly even benchmarks. A few others could be holy cows for the organisation.
We are not getting into identifying the few critical assumptions which hold back major performance improvements… I will cover it in subsequent posts.
Suffice it to say that if you are embarking on a supply chain transformation project, it must involve critiquing and demolishing a few of these critical assumptions!