I found a post over here over at Business Strategy interesting. The post describes how Lego led a company turnaround by focusing on supply chain transformation.

I really think they are onto something. I’ve written about this before (see here as one example) and believe there is a new opportunity for companies to look at their supply chain management competency as a more strategic weapon. With supply chains becoming more elongated as they become more global, with the pace of demand changes increasing and with product lifecycles shrinking, how responsive your fulfillment network and supply chain(s) are to change is becoming a more substantial determinant of your company’s success.

Far too often when companies struggle they attack the more cosmetic issues - they change personnel, they change pricing, they change product. While all of these may be required, evaluating the need for supply chain transformation as a competitive and strategic weapon seems to be overlooked far too frequently. Yet, these issues are often the true root causes of market problems.

More and more, companies are recognizing the need to become more demand-driven, to oriented everything they do around an outside-in mentality. As soon as you do this, you begin to realize that you can’t plan your customers, so you need to implement supply chain transformation processes to ensure your organization excels at responding to change. Doing so provides you with a competitive weapon against your global competitors.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 19th, 2007 at 9:16 am and is filed under Best practices, Response Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.