Strategic Supply Chain Management - Supply Chain Online

236 Strategic Supply Chain Management
become increasingly important. In the next generation, the supply chain
will be used as a way to increase sales opportunities and enhance customer
relationships before, during, and after the sale. This means that
you’ll need to pay close attention to the front end of the supply chain—
the activities associated with demand creation—and the increasing
impact of the Internet, online marketplaces, and collaborative relationships.
And as customers focus increasingly on their total cost of ownership,
they will look for suppliers who can extend superior supply chain
execution to their service offerings. Thus your roadmap also needs to
include a focus on the service supply chain.
We expect that today’s trend toward outsourcing will continue
to gather steam and that, in the future, companies will outsource even more
heavily in an attempt to transition as many fixed costs to variable costs as
possible. This means that effective collaboration will be even more critical
to success. Companies will need to be highly skilled at evaluating their
prospective partners and identifying those with whom a relationship will
result in the maximum economic value for each party. Logistics service
providers and manufacturing outsourcers will expand their skill sets, helping
their customers increase efficiencies while reducing labor requirements.
As technologies such as Web-enabled planning and optimization tools
continue to advance, more data will be available, and integration with suppliers
and customers will become more straightforward. At the same time,
the functionality enabled by these technologies will become more modular,
“commoditized,” and widely available. This means that information systems
aren’t likely to provide the level of competitive advantage they imparted in
the past; as with robust processes, they simply will be the price of entry.
DEVELOPING A ROADMAP
To understand how to develop your roadmap for an integrated, extended
supply chain, then, let’s revisit the steps shown in Figure 6-1 one by one.
Step 1: Set the Priorities for Change
The complexity of the supply chain—which touches numerous corporate
functions, including product design, procurement, manufacturing, distribution,
and postsales support, as well as diverse, often global sales
channels and external partners—makes pinpointing the right focus for
improvement efforts a challenge. Your supply chain strategy is the right
place to start.