Supply Chain Management: One Model

In a presentation at the University of Dayton and in his book Beyond Negotiation, Robert Walker offers a methodology for applying supply chain management to improve company, supplier, and customer performance. In his view, a supply chain is a supplier, a manufacturer, and a customer, linked together and working as a team to optimize chain performance. Below, a summary of his model for managing a supply chain1 ^,2 is discussed.

Applying supply chain principles can minimize business system cycle time, inventories, and costs, while assuring a timely delivery, to improve: (1) customer satisfaction and profits, (2) supplier profits, and (3) company profits. How?

Walker advises that you must review the entire chain and use process mapping (or value stream mapping) techniques to predict the chain's performance in areas such as business system cycle times, inventories, distribution requirements, costs, risk/delays, and so on. His basic definition of a supply chain requires three parties as participants in supply chain improvement. Focus is given to the performance of the entire chain, not just any individual participating member. It's essential that we look at the performance of the system, where the system in this case is defined as the aggregate performance of three companies in the chain. Improved consensus in decisions is built through the members of the supply chain, internally first, then...