Supply Chain Fundamental Rethinking

Analyst firm Gartner released its list of the top 25 supply chains for 2013. For the third year in a row, Apple topped the rankings. while McDonald's jumped to the number 2 spot, switching places with number 3 Amazon.com in 2013. Unilever (up from just 10 last year) at number 4 and Intel (up from number 7) round out the top 10 You may visit the link below for the complete list   http://www.scdigest.com/ASSETS/ON_TARGET/13-05-29-1.PHP?CID=7086

Organizations are entities with an endeavor to grow and grow consistently. In order to achieve the goals; organizations need to undertake improvement initiatives. The million dollar question is - which improvement initiative suits the best? Typically the 'flavour of the industry' gets rolled into being the philosophy for organizations improvement initiative. So if it is Lean as the flavour of the industry, then organizations also choose to go the Lean way, if it is Six Sigma then one chooses Six sigma & if it is BPR then one chooses BPR.  The KEY to the choice of an improvement initiatives not being part of the decision of the choice of the initiative leads to a suboptimal outcome of the improvement initiative . In my opinion one has broadly three approaches; a. The Control approach - The management wishes to bring the processes under acceptable limits of variation. So 'controlling' the variables impacting the outcome is the over-riding philosophy. T

In the world of business; we know that it is the series of links from the supplier to the customer which have to be synced to make you viable in the future. The performance of these links determine the overall performance of the Supply Chain in turn the Organi z ational Performance. Supply Chains undertake improvement i nitiatives by adopting the B est P ractices & T ools coupled with their T echniques ranging from Lean to BPR to incremental performance improvement initiatives. These initiatives are typically led & driven by the OEM or the Manuf acturing link of the Supply Chain .  While I work & observe such initiatives , i find them to be really energe tic, in certain cases led by a business case of the Supply Chain function indicating the improvement impact of the initiative on the Organi z ation & a lot of th at. Many a times the re sult of these improvement initiatives is reduction in inventory, improved quality, higher OTD from the Suppl ier &am

In the world of business today, Cash, more than anytime else in the history, is the King. The state of flux of demand, the uncertainty of economy & it's performance, increased stress on asset utilization & risks associated with global trade have resulted in an increased stress on the Supply Chain. It looks logical that the largest cost contributor to the organizational costs will have to lead the initiative to preserve 'Cash'. The improved Cash flow i.e. Working Capital Cycle naturally improves the position of your company where now you need to borrow less money, return some cash to shareholders etc. The Cash Flow Cycle of a business is pretty straight forward - you have accounts receivables (money that is to come into the business), accounts payable (money that you owe) & Inventory (money locked in the system). It is fairly obvious that the Cash is easy to be released into the business if the company works on reducing the days receivables outstanding

U.S. manufacturing costs are now equal to Mexico and will be equal to China by 2015 The rising costs of doin g business will eventually result into cost parity . The link to report below is an early warning sign for emerging count ries like China & India...   You may like to click the link below to read the latest re search, US manufacturing cost at parity with Mexico & will be with China by 2015