Developing SCM Strategies

Abstract

At the heart of supply chain management (SCM) can be found the continuous unfolding of dynamic organizational, marketplace, and product strategies that enable today’ s enterprise to leverage both the core competencies within its own boundaries as well as the almost limitless capabilities of supply channel partners in the search for new sources of competitive advantage. Unlike conventional strategic planning, which focuses around determining budgets and detailed metrics concerning the expected performance of existing products and processes, companies focused around the SCM paradigm perceive the formulation of business strategies as an opportunity to explore radically new and innovative approaches to the marketplace. Whereas SCM business strategies are concerned with the creation of new visions of logistics that transcend conventional techniques of purchasing, producing, moving, storing, and selling products and services, their real importance resides in their ability to assist executives in designing a clear blueprint for the development of new organizational architectures that will prepare their companies to build uncontested marketplace advantage in the future. SCM strategies can accomplish this objective by deploying new management models, productive processes, and technologies to achieve consistent and continuous breakthroughs in the creation of the products and services customers really want, the acquisition of new productive competencies or the migration of existing competencies to new functional areas, and the targeted utilization of the capabilities of supply channel partners to engineer an interenterprise vertical channel of many diverse competencies drawn together as a seamless, coherent customer-satisfying resource.