Strategic Supply Chain Management - Supply Chain Online

106 Strategic Supply Chain Management
Your organizational
design should not be
static—it should
evolve with your
company.
While the new organizational design was not put into place all at once,
Stratex kept the end state in view as the company began to use the new
processes. “Our new model meant that the buying and material planning
tasks were going to blend,” says Schlaefli. “You can’t just take a tactical
buyer who has been placing purchase orders by following system-generated
recommendations and suddenly turn him into a planner who needs to be
able to make decisions without completely concrete data. We had to do a
lot of retraining and, in some cases, some strategic hiring to develop the
organization we wanted.” Stratex provided on-site APICS 2 training for all
buyers and planners and hired several new employees with significant
experience in sourcing and master production scheduling processes.
The restructuring was completed over a period of several months,
roughly following the schedule of the manufacturing transition. The company
met an aggressive schedule to ramp production at its manufacturing
partner—with no negative impact on customer service levels. At the same
time, the increased focus on the planning process and the associated upgrade
of planning skills allowed Stratex to cut inventory liabilities dramatically.
The new organization was a key factor in Stratex’s ability to realize the benefits
of the company’s new strategy. “This didn’t happen overnight,” says
Schlaefli. “Having a map of where we wanted to go with the organization
made it a lot easier to implement the necessary
process changes.”
As the Stratex example shows, overall
design, combined with clearly defined roles
and responsibilities and skilled people, can
help a company build an integrated supply
chain organization that drives forward its
strategy. Your organizational design should
not be static—it should evolve with your
company.
Sweeping changes to operational
processes are not a prerequisite for restructuring your supply chain organization.
Organizational changes can improve overall performance even
without major process changes. Even relatively minor process changes
and an organizational adjustment can generate tremendous benefits.
Consider the case of Smith Bits, which uses state-of-the-art technologies
to design and manufacture a full line of drilling bits for the oilfield
and mining industries. In late 2002, the company was struggling with
rising field inventories despite growing customer demand. At the same
time, it was losing sales because the right bits were unavailable and order-