Supply Chain Management: Strategy, Planning, and Operation

Sunil Chopra and Peter Meindl

Prentice-Hall, 2001

ISBN: 0-13-026465-2

457 pages, $80

To order: Call (800) 282-0693

Most books on supply chain management adopt one of two perspectives: (1) an executive-level discussion of tactics and strategy, or the art of supply chain management, or (2) a more analytical look at the details of the managing product flows, the science of supply chain management, if you will. This book distinguishes itself from the norm by incorporating elements of each perspective.

Supply Chain Management is a collaborative effort between academia and industry. Sunil Chopra is a professor at Northwestern's Kellogg Graduate School of Management, while Peter Meindl is with i2 Technologies. The early chapters, which focus on understanding the supply chain's drivers and obstacles, provide a good foundation for any manager about to embark on a supply chain redesign. A similarly good management-oriented overview is presented in a concluding discussion on collaboration and the role of e-business in the supply chain. Again, these are insights that nontechnical managers can apply to their day-to-day operations and strategic planning.

Major portions of the book are devoted to the more technical aspects of supply chain management. The authors go into considerable detail, for example, on equations for determining the optimum level of product availability or on calculating demand uncertainty. This is the type of material especially useful to supply chains analysts and engineers.

By combining both the art and science of supply chain management, the authors have succeeded in making Supply Chain Management more than just solid text for MBA candidates; it's a working document that practitioners can put to use on the job.

The Art of .Combat

Shawn P. McCarthy

John Wiley & Sons

ISBN: 0-471-41519-7

238 pages, $24.95

To order: Call (800) 225-5945 or visit www.wiley.com

Ancient Chinese wisdom written more than 2,500 years ago may provide some heavy ammunition for today's Internet battlefield. That's the premise behind the book, The Art of .Combat.

Author Shawn McCarthy updates the precepts found in the famous military manual The Art of War, by General Sun Tzu, to the world of e-commerce. In his classic text, Tzu offered guidance to other generals on strategies and tactics for defeating their enemies. McCarthy directs his book at CEOs looking for that piece of competitive intelligence that will allow them to conquer cyberspace and capture profits from e-commerce. McCarthy applies Tzu's precepts on basic training, battle preparation, and combat itself to the modern digital battlefield. For instance, Tzu says a general should do what he can to make his army invulnerable to attack. In the updated view, that maxim translates to the CEO developing customer loyalty, proprietary technology, the right product mix, and an easy-to-navigate Web site to protect his business.

Although the book deals mainly with business strategy, it does address the important role of supply chain management in the e-commerce era. That's no surprise, given the author's background. McCarthy once worked as the online editor for Logistics Management and Distribution Report, a sister publication to Supply Chain Management Review. In fact, he argues convincingly that true supply chain management would not be possible without the Internet because the integration of supplier, manufacturer, and customer depends on the flow of information across the Web.

Although McCarthy sometimes stretches Tzu's precepts on warfare to make them fit into his central premise, more often than not the correllations drawn have a resounding ring of truth to them. But the most fascinating part of the book is the end, in which the author looks at emerging Internet technologies such as VRML (Virtual Reality Modeling Language), haptic interfaces, peer-to-peer networking, and interactive advertising. McCarthy offers some intriguing thoughts on the possible impact of these new technologies on future business development.

Supply Chain Cybermastery: Building High Performance Supply Chains of the Future

Andrew J. Berger and John L. Gattorna

Gower Publishing Co., 2001

ISBN: 0-566-08413-9

220 pages; $79.95

To order: Call Ashgate Publishing Company at (800) 535-9544 or visit www.gowerpub.com

It's clear from the introduction of Supply Chain Cybermastery: Building High Performance Supply Chains of the Future that Andrew Berger and John Gattorna are not writing an e-business implementation guide or prescribing an organizational chart for the future. Instead, they intend their book to be a forward-looking piece of thought leadership that will, in their words, "inform, test, and challenge the reader."

A statement like this is enough to make any informed reader of business books a little wary. Too often, "thought-leadership" books indulge in overblown hyperbole or else offer nothing more than fuzzy predictions as substantial as cotton candy. Admirably, Supply Chain Cybermastery avoids both these traps. It provides a calm, rational look at the various technology trends that are affecting supply chain management.

The chapter on e-marketplaces is a good example of Berger and Gattorna's evenhanded approach. The two Accenture consultants neither promote e-marketplaces as the panacea to supply chain collaboration problems nor condemn them as a waste of time and money. Instead they provide clear definitions of the different types of e-marketplaces, possible business models in the future, and key challenges and lessons.

The book does not solely focus on e-marketplaces, however. In fact, it doesn't really hang on one central theme at all, but instead offers a series of points of view on emerging movements in supply chain management. These range from e-procurement, e-fulfillment, and e-design to new IT architecture for supply chains. While this format does allow readers to read only the specific chapters of interest to them, it also makes the book feel a bit disjointed and cursory at times. As Berger and Gattorna roam over a wide-range of topics, they sometimes fail to develop some intriguing and potentially insightful comments. For example, the authors assert that the operations for e-fulfillment have "subtle but significant differences" even from traditional one-to-one shipping. However these differences are not fully explained.

Yet these flaws in the details do not overly detract from the big picture view that Supply Chain Cybermastery provides.

www.rosettanet.org

Web site of RosettaNet

Any company even remotely interested in the standards movement and how it can enable collaboration should take a look at the Web site for RosettaNet, a consortium of companies in the high tech industry. RosettaNet is a leader in creating and implementing XML-based, open e-business standards. According to the organization, these standards will form a common e-business language, which will help high-tech companies align processes between supply chain partners on a global basis.

RosettaNet's Web site contains an impressive archive of publicly accessible information about its three main initiatives: the RosettaNet Dictionaries, RosettaNet Implementation Framework, and the RosettaNet Partner Interface Processes (PIPs). The dictionaries define how to use XML (extensible mark-up language) to describe products, partners, and business transactions. The framework establishes a "grammar," or template, for the e-business messages being exchanged between servers. And, most importantly, the PIPs specify how two specific processes running in two different partners' organizations can be standardized and interfaced across the supply chain. In other words, a PIP helps companies turn what used to be a human-to-human dialogue over the telephone about sales promotion and rebate information, for example, into an automatic server-to-server exchange of information.

The Web site includes user's guides, overviews, and explanations of the different standards as well as the dictionaries themselves and XML schemas for the different PIPs. In general, the guides provide an excellent overview of the initiatives. For example, the document describing "Clusters, Segments and PIPS" does a good job of defining the six different "clusters" or categories of PIPS: partner, product, and service review; product introduction; order management; inventory management; marketing information management; and service and support. Occasionally, however, the guides lapse into technical jargon and can be dense to wade through for the XML neophyte. Users unfamiliar with XML may also have a hard time understanding the downloadable PIP schemas.

When it comes to actually implementing the PIPs, the Web site, obviously, will not replace guidance from RosettaNet experts. But it does serve as an excellent resource for learning more about the consortium's initiatives.