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What differentiates winning Supply Chains from others?
Most leading companies and a whole lot of their competitors have now adopted the ‘best practices’ in their industry and put in place reasonably efficient processes. However, we still find some companies consistently outperforming others in their supply chain effectiveness.
What differentiates these companies?
Conventional supply chain models, policies, processes, and practices have evolved assuming certainty of market demand. The uncertainties are dealt through either safety stocks or exceptional execution. Some companies have dealt with uncertainty through ‘Scenario Planning’, which is nothing but taking certain possibilities and converting each one into a certainty for planning purpose.
Despite our best efforts to predict, markets will continue to surprise us in new ways. For example, who can predict a competitor’s product getting banned for regulatory violations? And its impact on the surge in our product’s demand?
The real difference between ‘Winners’ and ‘Also ran’ is in their response to such market surprises? How soon do they detect it? How fast can they respond consistently? How flexible are they in reconfiguring their backend supply processes? These are the underlying supply chain capabilities which need to be developed and nurtured to make the supply chain more Agile.
Do you have a structured improvement process in place for these supply chain capabilities?