Strategic Supply Chain Management - Supply Chain Online

36 Strategic Supply Chain Management
NEXT-GENERATION STRATEGY
Today’s supply chain architectures are designed predominately for excellence
in cost reduction through a focus on back-end processes, such as
purchasing, manufacturing, and physical distribution. This can translate
into efficient supply chains that often don’t truly support overall business
strategy.
Next-generation supply chain strategies will support continuing
improvements in productivity but also will drive the achievement of business-level
outcomes—with a strong focus on the customer. It will be
important in the future to identify these objectives, which will include
new revenue-generating services and time-to-market, time-to-volume,
and customer-segment-specific capabilities.
In the future, supply chain strategy also naturally will consider the
supply chain as part of an extended business architecture and consider
key targeted outcomes with suppliers, customers, and partners as core
elements. We expect to see the changes shown in Figure 1-5.