PERFECT YOUR SUPPLY CHAIN ALIGNMENT

​SUPPLY CHAIN ALIGNMENT CHALLENGE
Supply Chain Management has become the common cry in business today, we often hear that we must manage the supply chain from "the supplier's supplier to our customer's customer." This is an interesting thought and on the surface, one would say that it is the correct approach.
This total approach to Supply Chain Management is correct and vitally important. Today most companies relate this End-To-End supply chain management thinking to these eight key business processes:

1. Customer Relationship Management
2. Customer Service Management
3. Demand Management
4. Order Fulfillment
5. Manufacturing Flow Management
6. Supplier Relationship Management
7. Product Development and Commercialization
8. Return Management.

There is no doubt that all these processes are important and need to managed and controlled perfectly to achieve the goals of any company:

• Be Profitable
• Be a company with a fantastic culture
• Be a partner with all suppliers
• Be a consistent supplier of goods to your customers
• Be all they can be to their workforce
• Be continuously improving and developing new products

Understanding the top eight supply chain initiatives and having a sound grasp on what a company wants to achieve is a great starting point, the challenge is how to manage all the different processes, and business forces, within the End-To-End supply chain.
The answer is to review and understand your processes and determine if they are in total alignment. This review needs to be done without bias and most important be driven from the eyes of the customers.
For example, you may continuously be fighting supplier late deliveries and your improvement is to work on your supply base blaming them for the issues.
However if you looked at this in your End-To-End review you may find that Customer Service is continuously booking orders inside your total lead time requirements often putting your supply base in lead time jeopardy.
Looking at this same issue from the Customer Services point of view, the lead-time they are promising to the customer is a lead-time that puts you in a competitive arena with your competition.
Another example might be that your factory is constantly behind schedule, they blame a combination of planning, and purchasing for this continues situation, however when you investigate you find that the factory flow has no flow at all and completion dates ignored. So obviously, this should lead a company away from the blame game and into working on the correct problem.
A company can continually go up and down the key eight-supply chain processes looking for that one magic bullet that will make all issues disappear. This can become a costly and fruitless effort.
Concentrating of individual links in the supply chain will never produce a strong and profitable chain. Companies should think about this as an alignment improvement effort. This effort should embrace all eight segments simultaneously starting from meeting the customer's needs and working down all the remaining segments.
A suggestion would be to invest in a End-To-End Supply Chain Assessment. This will result in providing a comprehensive road map allowing you to concentrate on correcting the entire supply chain alignment.
Please don't hesitate to call or email Marino Associates for more information on are assessment process.
Dan Marino
Marino Associates, LLC
860-623-2521 Office
860-558-8564 Cell
www.dmarinoassociates.com