The key question at this point becomes: How do supply chain processes create more value as the enterprise matures and expands? With determining how to improve business process at the forefront of management thinking, driven to reap the benefits illustrated in Figure 1.2, the opportunity becomes one of moving a firm through a logical progression to achieve the highest possible benefits. Along the way, the firm moving toward the intelligent value network wants to quantify the potential value of the transformation. That effort requires the creation of a process maturity roadmap, which follows the maturity model and leads the firm to becoming part of the best process-enabled extended enterprise and eventually an intelligent value network.

To create such a map, we need a process model of the extended enterprise, one that in particular illustrates the key supply chain processes that the enterprise executes. A process model that has become a standard in many industries over the last few years is the Supply-Chain Operations Reference (SCOR ) model, developed by the Supply-Chain Council, an independent, not-for-profit, global corporation with membership open to all companies and organizations interested in applying and advancing the state-of-the-art in supply chain management systems and practices. The SCOR model captures the council's consensus view of supply chain management.

For the supply chain practitioner, SCOR provides an excellent starting point for developing supply chain thinking, and we have adopted it to guide our thinking about process maturity. SCOR ...