Sustainable Supply Chain Excellence

Organisations need to achieve excellence. Guess post the Tom Peter's book, In Search of Excellence, 25 years back, the term seems to have made organisations aspire for - Excellence. Supply Chain excellence is critical initiative for achieving organisational excellence. But what is excellence? It simply means the customers of my product or service choose me ahead of my competitors. Even when they have a choice. You don't follow benchmarks, you create one. (http://ageofdiscontinuity.blogspot.com/2009/06/supply-chain-excellence-and-relevance.html)


For sometime excellence was equated to Quality. Quality in turn was meetings specs. So excellence = meeting specs. The imitation of specs made the parameter redundant. It was so easy to meet the desired specs that competitors sooner than later made the organisation loose the competitive advantage. The product or service was thus 'commoditized'. If you can't differentiate, you can't claim excellence. So the revolution of making 'mass customization'. The lever moved from quality to transformation link of the supply chain. Organisations using that lever excelled for some time. A lever like manufacturing is easy to replicate. It requires the competitors to use a supply chain design which makes them achieve the same results. No more is excellence achieved.

The interesting part of the story is the way in which organisations try or have tried to achieve excellence is by 'configuring the supply chain' for its 'hard' components. Organisations change processes and practices, adopt to world class benchmarking for their inventory cycles, OEE, working capital cycles and logistics networks, undertake Process re-engieering for their procurement department or production or new product introduction and many more...but stay far away from achieving 'sustainable excellence'. My understanding is that all that is done to achieve excellence is the 'hard' part of the supply chain. Advantages like new technology have their life before the competitor makes it redundant, improving inventory turns is only to a limit before the benchmark you followed was turned over by some better number..

Sustainable excellence is - People. Something which can't be replicated by your competitor hence will be sustainable. Supply Chain excellence is about People.

Nurturing the Connectors, Salesman and Maven's of your Supply Chain!
(http://ageofdiscontinuity.blogspot.com/2009/12/connectors-and-saleman-in-supply-chain.html)
(http://ageofdiscontinuity.blogspot.com/2009/09/mavens-in-supply-chain.html)