The Rise of the Supply Chain Advocate

This is an excerpt of the original article. It was written for the September-October 2015 edition of Supply Chain Management Review. The full article is available to current subscribers.

September-October 2015

It’s September, which means the kids are going back to school, and soon, you’ll spend the evenings helping them with their lessons. September is also the month that we publish Gartner’s annual look at the Top 25 supply chains. While the Top 25 is a celebration of great supply chains, the leaders also offer lessons for the rest of us who aspire to the top. It’s news you can use right now in your planning. And, we’ll have you home for dinner on Tuesday. We hope you’ll join us for this inaugural event.

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In an ideal world, every trading partner in a supply chain pulls together to achieve the best balance between cost and service. Supply chains synchronized in this way are efficient, agile, and able to respond quickly to shifts in the market.

In the real world, such a high level of collaboration is difficult to achieve. Rather than perform together like a well-tuned orchestra, multiple trading partners often play their own tunes. They are more likely to pull in different tactical and strategic directions, impairing end-to-end visibility and coordination. The resulting lack of alignment and supply chain visibility creates costly inefficiencies and slows responses to the market.

Bringing these entities into line requires changes in behavior that comply with the supply chain’s overarching performance objectives. To get buy in, these changes must be orchestrated in a way that benefits each party in the value chain—otherwise there is little incentive to participate in the change management exercise.

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