How to get end-to-end supply chain planning right

This is an excerpt of the original article. It was written for the July-August 2017 edition of Supply Chain Management Review. The full article is available to current subscribers.

July-August 2017

A few years ago, a Harvard Business Review cover posed the question: What’s the secret to winning in the global economy? The answer: Talent.

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For decades, supply chain planning (SCP) has been a major challenge for companies of all sizes. A common theme plays out in most cases: Organizations invest substantially—both in time and money—in their planning capabilities, only to see poor results.

Let’s take a recent example. A large consumer packaged goods company was struggling with less than ideal inventory performance and relatively high case fill rates. But because their performance metric was defined to favor the efforts of execution, rather than truly meeting demand on time and in full, their supply chain costs were higher than their peers.

This company had made years of investments in multiple SCP technologies that were only partly satisfactory. Spreadsheets were still persistent across the organization and were commonly used for key parts of the SCP process. When the organization uncovered gaps in their SCP technology capabilities, it remedied these shortfalls with temporary workarounds and the allocation of additional resources.

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