{"id":10,"date":"2006-06-19T11:15:39","date_gmt":"2006-06-19T16:15:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/wordpress\/?p=10"},"modified":"2006-08-15T08:32:08","modified_gmt":"2006-08-15T13:32:08","slug":"creating-sustainable-competitive-advantage-in-your-supply-chain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/at-scm.com\/index.php\/2006\/06\/19\/supply-chain-management\/creating-sustainable-competitive-advantage-in-your-supply-chain\/","title":{"rendered":"Creating sustainable competitive advantage in your supply chain"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>If I were to saunter down to a manufacturing\/operations floor and impress upon the line managers that what they should really be doing in their operations is creating competitive advantage, chances are I&#8217;d be shown the door toute suite. Perhaps, I should be. A wise consultant does not get his head chopped off by spouting well worn academic\/business terminology even if it is essential to business survival.<br \/>\nT&#8217;is something that I have learnt from working with managers &#8211; a commandment to savor &#8211; <em><strong>Thou shall not confuse the managers you seek to change<\/strong><\/em>.<br \/>\nWhat is the <a title=\"Competitive Advantage Model\" href=\"http:\/\/www.valuebasedmanagement.net\/methods_porter_competitive_advantage.html\">Competitive Advantage Model<\/a> of <a title=\"Michael Porter of Harvard Business School\" href=\"http:\/\/www.isc.hbs.edu\/\">Michael Porter<\/a>?<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><em>Competitive strategy is about taking offensive or defensive action to create a defendable position in an industry in order to cope successfully with competitive forces and generate a superior return on investment (ROI).<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>And more or less:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><em>The basis of above-average performance within an industry is sustainable competitive advantage of which there are two essential types:<br \/>\n1. Cost leadership (low cost)<br \/>\n2. Differentiation<br \/>\nNo matter the scope of the above two types, the resultant competitive strategy is:<br \/>\n3. Focus<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>If one were to adpat such a model into one&#8217;s framework of developing a supply chain, it is quite obvious that both cost leadership and differentiation can be adapted.<br \/>\nHere&#8217;s a <a title=\"Creating sustainable competitive advantage through Innovation\" href=\"http:\/\/www.innovationlabs.com\/innovation.html\">view of how a firm can create sustainable competitive advantage <\/a>by Innovation labs.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><em>The only way a competitive advantage of any kind can be made to sustain is through innovation.<br \/>\nThis might logically lead you to ask how we define innovation. In our view, innovation is improvement in the value that a company offers to its customers, or reduction in the cost of delivering value to customers. <\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>They go on to differentiate <u>continuous innovation<\/u> which is characterized as small and incremental and <u>discontinuous innovation<\/u> which is characterized by breakthroughs and disruptions. But is there any reason to think that even innovation can be sustainable ad infinitum &#8211; I think not. How about the process of continuous and discontinuous innovation? Perhaps, they can be sustained a little longer than the actual service\/product created.<br \/>\nGoing back to the outline from Porter&#8217;s model:<br \/>\nMore than cost leadership, which may be a function of continuous improvement and strategic decision making to outsource or offshore low-value added activities, differentiation &#8211; real differentiation, seems to be the more significant lever of creating <strong><u>true<\/u><\/strong> sustained competitive advantage. How? &#8211; I&#8217;ll try to elucidate that in the next few posts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>If I were to saunter down to a manufacturing\/operations floor and impress upon the line managers that what they should really be doing in their operations is creating competitive advantage, chances are I&#8217;d be shown the door toute suite. Perhaps, I should be. A wise consultant does not get his head chopped off by spouting [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-strategy","category-supply-chain-management"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/at-scm.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/at-scm.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/at-scm.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/at-scm.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/at-scm.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/at-scm.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/at-scm.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/at-scm.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/at-scm.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<!-- WP Super Cache is installed but broken. The constant WPCACHEHOME must be set in the file wp-config.php and point at the WP Super Cache plugin directory. -->