New research cited here at CNNMoney.com identifies characteristics of supply chain leaders. According to the article, the survey, which was completed by supply chain professionals in 21 industries, identifies collaboration as a major differentiator between leaders and those identified as “followers” and “laggards.” The survey findings also indicate a significant opportunity for financial officer involvement in supply chain efforts.

The focus on collaboration is certainly very positive and consistent with what we see in the marketplace. I’ve written about the importance of collaboration many times (see here, here and here).

I found the focus on financial officer involvement interesting and a potential catch-22. On the one hand, I think this has significant potential in that supply chain professionals too frequently take a unit rather than dollar viewpoint on supply chain management decisions. Involving the financial organization offers opportunities here. The risk is that this drives everything to be too tactically focused with decisions purely based just on the economics. The reality is that you can’t plan your customers today. So, there are a lot of decisions that are going to be high impact/risk to the business where tradeoffs need to be made. Financial considerations should always be a part of that - you need to make decisions that are aligned with your corporate objectives. But so too are customer satisfaction considerations essential to these tradeoffs - factoring in the impact of this one decision on the long-term relationship with the customer and the downstream implications this decision may have on future business opportunities.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 4th, 2007 at 9:03 am and is filed under Best practices, General News. 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.