SCMR’s Spirit of Renewal

Spring is a time for renewal. It’s a time for reassessing the way we’ve been doing things and making changes in a manner that ensures forward progress. That’s a recurring theme of the articles in this May/June issue of Supply Chain Management Review. It’s also speaks to the magazine itself, as we’ll explain in more detail below.

But remember. In renewing your supply chain operations, you need to do it on a solid foundation.

Certainly, the process through which you make your supply chain decisions needs to be one of those foundational elements. But how often do we make important decisions based on little more than intuition or simply past experience? Too often, answer business authors William B. Lee and Errol Wirasinghe. Their article lays out a seven-step approach to putting real structure around supply chain decision making.

Accurately matching supply with demand has to be considered another essential building block to supply chain success. A well-conceived and executed sales and operations planning (S&OP) program can enable that. Problem is, many S&OP initiatives that begin with great promise devolve into a disjointed, largely ineffectual exercise. Like the decision-making article, Manoj Singh’s S&OP feature in this issue offers a structured approach to avoiding that scenario.

Educators Peter Duchessi and IndoShobha Chengalur—Smith of the University of Albany focus in on the state of adoption of three core supply chain competencies—supply chain design, inventory management, and IT investment and adoption. Many organizations still fall short of mastering performance in these areas, the authors discovered in their research. They offer some valuable advice on becoming more “sophisticated” practitioners of these supply chain arts and sciences.

With the building blocks in place and the spirit of renewal in full bloom, who knows what levels of supply chain excellence can be achieved?

Now about that spirit of renewal as it relates to SCMR. With this May/June 2010 issue we begin this stage of our publishing life as part of a company called Peerless Media, a divison of EH Publishing Inc. Joining us are three sister publications that also were formerly part of Reed Business Information (RBI). They are Logistics Management, Modern Materials Handling, and Material Handling Product News.

Our whole staff is very excited about the move. Being part of smaller company gives us more flexibility in responding to reader information needs and launching new features both in the print publication and on our web site. In fact we invite you to become regular viewers of https://www.scmr.com to witness the progress we’ll be making. And as we’ve done since our founding in 1997, we promise to keep delivering the supply chain thought leadership you’ve come to expect from SCMR.

E-mail: fquinn@ehpub.com

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