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The next step in prioritizing your supply chain goals is recognizing your competitors. In the age of e-commerce, your competitors may not be who you think they are. Many traditional retail stores, for example, have been slow to realize that their most aggressive competitor is not another brick-and-mortar store, but a website: Amazon.com. Amazon.com isn’t competing only with retailers, however; it’s also competing with trucking companies, warehousing and distribution companies, and even technology companies such as Apple and Microsoft.

To understand who your real competitors are, you need to stop thinking about the product or service that you sell and start thinking about the problem that it solves. Clayton Christensen of Harvard Business School called this approach to matching your product with a customer’s problem the Jobs to Be Done Theory. Think about what “job” your product or service does for your customers and what other products or services might be able to do that same job better, faster, or cheaper. These alternative products (or services) are your product’s real competitors, and you need to design and manage your supply chain so that your product can do that same job better than its competitors.