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Focus on functional excellence often leads to supply chain underperformance.
Many companies put a lot of emphasis on individual functional excellence, hoping that excellence in each function would result in overall business excellence. It’s an erroneous assumption.
If employees are evaluated and rewarded based on how well their specific function has performed, they would take their eyes off consumers and focus internally. Production people would focus on improving machine and labour productivity, procurement team would focus on material unit cost reduction, logistics focusing on minimizing freight cost, etc. What happens to customer service? Would it improve product availability and freshness?
It is important to ensure that individual functional excellence is subservient to the need for customer focus. If it means taking smaller production batches and expediting dispatches to meet a customer order on time, so be it.
We should never lose focus on the overall business excellence, all other objectives should be subservient to it.