Supply Chain Fundamental Rethinking

A lot is being said & pondered over the nature of the environment in which enterprises operate. The current environment is considered to be 'chaotic'. The 'Alignment' of the enterprise with the customer is considered to be the most important mantra for success.  I wonder what does alignment mean in the context where the environment is chaotic & the customer hence is not static. In my opinion organisations need 'dynamic alignment'. Organisations which are able to know the ingredients of what makes up for alignment & continuously gauge the shifts in the environment to keep themselves abreast with the latest parameters of alignment would be successful. Dynamic alignment needs 'Adaptive Organisations'. Adaptive organisations is a function of the People. It's your workforce. They way it is  recruited, developed, appreciated or rejected. Encouraged to take up new tasks. How is your workforce respected, trusted & celebrated.I think ...

In the current state of environment, it is apparent that the economies across the world are experiencing a demand side slow down, almost a contraction. The rate of growth has significantly come down leading to lowering the rate at which organisations need to work. Many companies have taken actions to close down a few shifts, some have closed down their plants, a few also have laid off people & some have postponed their capital expenditures. It almost is like passing through a phase of  industry cycle where you actually have spare capacity in almost everything. Similar to an Army which is not at war. Arguably Army represents one of the early formal organisational structures of work. It is of interest of explore 'when not at War what does the army do'? It seems that army views this period of time to be most appropriate time to sharpen it's weapons, plan new strategies, improve on the skills, think of buying & training on new weapons etc etc. When not at war is ...

Strategist consider scenarios of Static, Dynamic, Complex & Chaotic environments in which industries operate.  The parameters for determining the same are – number of variables in the environment & the rate of change of those variables. A chaotic environment is one when the rate of change is high & the number of variables in the environment are large. The industry context for that period of industry life cycle is a ‘Chaotic’ environment. The current industry is passing through a phase like that with no surety if that is a permanent change in the way it will need to operate for years to come. Supply Chains are structures which support a random event called ‘sales’. Each Supply Chain supports a systemic component of demand & a random component of demand. The state of Supply Chains in Chaotic industry context makes the component of ‘random’ness increase. While enterprises may engage in the creation of their Strategic Plans, most of t...

It looks like the world has got frenzied about the 'customer' & the customer is believed to need everything 'cheaper' today than what is was 'yesterday'. Supply Chains of the world undergo a structural to meet the challenge of cost reduction. China being the 'Plant of the World' & India being the 'Back office of the world' made the western geographies set their supply chain nodes in these countries. These countries thrived on the export of work from the West to these countries. As  inflation in these countries coupled with the infrastructure bottlenecks increase over a period of time the competitive lever of 'cost' would move to some other geographies as these countries may not be the 'least' cost provider of goods & services. Particularly in India where the policies have been such that the cost of electricity, gas or oil along-with the real estate in many parts is more than the cost in US of A. It looks appar...

http://www.scmr.com/images/site/SCMR_SepOct_2012_Raising_The_Bar_B321.pdf

Strategist consider scenarios of Static, Dynamic, Complex & Chaotic environments in which  industries operate. The parameters for determining the same are – number of variables in  the environment & the rate of change of those variables. A chaotic environment is one when  the rate of change is high & the number of variables in the environment are large. The  industry context for that period of industry life cycle is a ‘Chaotic’ environment. The current  industry is passing through a phase like that with no surety if that is a permanent change in  the way it will need to operate for years to come. Supply Chains are structures which support a random event called ‘sales’. Each Supply Chain  supports a systemic component of demand & a random component of demand. The state of  Supply Chains in Chaotic industry context makes the component of  'randomness' increase.  While enterprises m...

data... http://www.scdigest.com/assets/News/12-08-16.htm#FT

Learning from history doesn't seem to come to the Industry & humans in the industry as a natural process of being in the business of business. It is so visible in endless repetition of the identically configured boom & bust cycles. The response to the situation also doesn't change is such a dark situation which the automobile industry is passing through... http://www.moneycontrol.com/news/business/auto-companies-stop-production-as-demand-slump-continues_719729.html#toptag

It has been of great interest to keep visualizing & drawing the changing landscape of supply chains. The movement from static to dynamic to chaotic has led to process changes in Supply Chains. Aspiration to reach more customers have change the networks of many from being single country to internationalized coupled with complexity of increased players in the supply chain. Evolution of Efficient Customer Response (ECR) needs have reduced the buffers in the form of time &inventory with practices like Lean. With technology enabling the performance of modern day supply chains, its of great interest to wish for nothing less than optimal performance. While the structural, infrastructure, process & practices of any supply chain try to meet the contemporary requirements of that stage of market, wonder if the current state of the supply chains have the competencies & skills of the Supply Chain Managers match the demand of the role? In Supply Chains we know all that is i...

Good video on Supply Chain in numbers & Risk management. http://www.scdigest.com/NEWSVIEWS/12-03-12-1.PHP?cid=5589&ctype=content

It has been all too much a need for Indian organisations to improve their practices,where the rate of change is unheard of for many organisations. A large conglomerate with a rich tradition of being around of three generations will find the need to be much more acute. And then comes a management mandate to undertake an large scale improvement project. So does the top management do! A large scale project with consultants, who are trained & have delivered projects (and to spice it up GLOBALLY) using world class improvement philosophies like BPR, Lean, Six Sigma or Theory of Constraints, gets rolled out & delivered to perfection with all the principles of the philosophy in the right spirit of the philosophy. Let me work you through one such example in India. The supply chain improvement solution needed the suppliers of the buying organisation to manage the inventory based on the pre-determined 'buffer' level to be maintained. The suppliers were given the target levels ...

I love this domain on SC Risk Management...the future of successful supply chains is likely to stay with organisations who manage the risks better than many... Global Supply Chain News: Toyota Taking Massive Effort to Reduce Its Supply Chain Risk in Japan

Educational Supply Chain in India particularly for the Management education, has seen emergence of Channel Partners. They have received a growing importance in the industry value chain. Thought of writing on the same. The input stage of the supply chain is the selection of students for the program. This happens through an elaborate admissions mechanism which the management institutes design based on their own selection criteria. The potential students who aspire for the educational institute would have to appear for the appropriate entrance test (& you have multiple of those today). The students would end up with a preparatory course for the test delivered by coaching institutes. The students are advised by the 'mentors' of the institutes for the 'quality' of the educational institute. Based on the advise the students would decide to apply. You already have a channel partner with a large influence on the potential customer existing in the supply chain. The custome...