Sep 28, 2006 0
Creating Supply Chain Value w Cycle Time Inventory Yield – Part 1
You might have heard the oft repeated caveat – Truth in Advertising… What I knew vaguely was cleared up quite easily by running a google query – that there are actually truth-in-advertising rules that apply to advertisers, courtesy of the FTC. Here’s the link to the FAQs concerning truth in advertising.
So, what about truth in supply chains? That’s what Thomas Craig sort of has in mind in his article Creating Supply Chain Value w/Cycle Time & Inventory Yield published earlier this month at webpronews.com. He begins with the following lead…
A supply chain is not a series of links forged together for a common purpose. That is a nice image. However it minimizes the reality of the chain and how each link in that chain must design its own logistics process to function within the chain.
Or to put it simply – where the theory meets the practise…
The success of the chain depends on many things. How well and how clearly the key player in the chain, the large retailer/mass merchandiser or whoever, has defined what he is doing and why he is doing it that way. For suppliers located within the chain, this is important. There is no one standard universal chain. What you are dealing with are multiple, different supply chains and logistics processes and supply chains for each customer. That means developing agile, tailored logistics solutions to meet the requirements of each customer.
Thomas hits on a very important point in the above paragraph – he doesn’t flesh it out sufficiently in theory even though he elaborates what he experiences in practise. In theory, a supply chain is defined as interacting upstream and downstream links. What Thomas Craig is alluding to in the above is that within a market solution for a customer(s), there are interacting supply chains which may or may not be aligned, structured similarily or even designed with an overarching purpose in mind.