Supply chain lies at the center of the value chain. The importance of a supply chain strategy for successful implementation of company strategy need not be stressed further.
While designing supply chain strategy, companies have the tendency to select from one of these sets of options: “Being customer focused or product focused?”; “Focusing on efficiency or flexibility?”; “Organizing management regionally or globally?”; and “Adopting a centralized or decentralized structure?” Developing a competitive advantage in supply chain management requires achieving multi-dimensional excellence. Therefore, focusing attention soley on a single issue trade-off and ignoring the others has serious negative effects.
At Deloitte, we help our clients have a better understanding of the required strategic decisions within the supply chain and allows them to make these decisions effectively in developing supply chain strategies that will be aligned with business strategies, increase stakeholder value, and reduce risk.
Once the supply chain strategy is defined, focus has to be shifted to the implementation of plans in accordance with their defined strategies and the supply chain organization becomes the next priority.
Operations performed separately by different units of the supply chain that are driven by their own targets do not optimize whole of the supply chain. In order to manage the supply chain in the best way possible, all supply chain functions should be organized in a way that will support sufficient information sharing, have pre-defined roles and responsibilities, and have identified reporting relationships.
