Sales & Operations Process Improvement
Designing your Supply Chain

January 2014    
In This Issue
Interesting new projects
Designing your Supply Chain

 

In my Ph.D program I took a course on Global Supply Chain Design.  While this focused on setting up a supply chain that crossed countries and continents, the decisions are just as applicable to regional and national supply chains.  What the course really taught me is that supply chains should be designed.  Often the decisions you will read about below are never made; they just happen by default.  Even if you decide that one of these strategies is not applicable to your company, make sure that you make this decision. 

We hope this information helps you serve customers better and reduces your costs.   

Sincerely,

Mitch and The Supply Velocity Team
Ray & Cyril
Interesting New Projects        

Mitch is helping a packaging producer map their supply chain processes in preparation for their ERP implementation.  The process flow map will help them understand which processes can benefit from eliminating manual (non-value-added) work.  This will speed up the implementation and improve the results (faster service, less inventory and higher labor productivity) they achieve from their investment in software. 

Ray is helping a consumer products company implement Lean Manufacturing and synchronize their supply chain.  This includes setting up flow cells and working with feeders to ensure the right inventory is at the right place at the right time. 

Cyril is helping a solar company build a new production facility in the United States. 

Designing your Supply Chain 

Link to the White-Paper

http://www.supplyvelocity.com/wp-content/uploads/Designing-Your-Global-Supply-Chain.pdf

 

 

In the 1990's, and with the rise of the concept of Supply Chain Management, supply chains have gone global. Creating a global supply chain forced companies to consider the strategic choices they made when designing their supply chain.   

 

Globalization has included suppliers in many different countries, setting up warehouses to serve global customers, creating transportation systems to move goods around the world and moving production facilities to best-cost countries. Examples of best cost countries are Germany and Japan for machinery, the USA for sophisticated hardware and software design, China for high labor content products and large heavy industry, Korea for ship building and large heavy industry, India for lower-value software design, France and Italy for fashion luxury goods, and others.

 

However, these decisions are not only for global supply chain design.  Whether you operate regionally, nationally or globally, you will make decisions about your supply chain... by design or default.  Fortunately, Supply Chain researchers have documented these choices into 15 decisions.   The attached link to a white-paper briefly explains the 15 choices that can help you optimize your supply chain (minimize cost and maximize customer service). The 15 choices are:

 

  1. Consolidation
  2. Postponement
  3. Responsiveness
  4. Lean-ness
  5. Agility
  6. Adaptability
  7. Flexibility
  8. Speed
  9. Value Contribution
  10. Core Competency
  11. Differentiation
  12. Collaboration
  13. Hedging
  14. Redundancy
  15. Diversification

The details of each supply chain design strategy are in the attached white-paper.  Each is only a paragraph, but because their are 15 in total, it would make this e-newsletter too long. 
http://www.supplyvelocity.com/wp-content/uploads/Designing-Your-Global-Supply-Chain.pdf

If you want more information any of these strategies, give Mitch Millstein a call (314-406-4962) or send him an email (mitch@supplyvelocity.com).