Читать книгу Supply Chain Management Best Practices - David Blanchard - Страница 13

Admittedly, the preceding example represents a rather extreme and time-compressed scenario, but on any given day, a supply chain manager has to deal with numerous situations quite similar to those just described, with the expectation that costs will be minimized, disruptions will be avoided, customers will be satisfied, and the profitability of the company will be enhanced. No pressure, right?

Maybe we're getting ahead of ourselves, though, so let's start at the beginning: What exactly is a supply chain? There are plenty of definitions for the term, and we'll look at a couple of them, but this question gets asked so often because the answer tends to change depending on who's doing the telling. It's like that old fable about the blind men who stumble on an elephant and try to tell each other what the elephant is like: The man holding the elephant's leg thinks the animal looks like a tree; the man holding the tail thinks an elephant resembles a rope; a third man who grabbed a tusk thinks the whole animal must look like a spear. Each of their answers is partly right, but anybody who has actually seen an elephant smiles at the story because they know these blind men are missing the big picture.

The funny thing is, those kinds of faulty assumptions are made all the time about supply chains. For instance, since online retailer Amazon's supply chain is based on a model of guaranteed deliveries and free shipping, that's become the de facto model for all online retail companies, or for that matter, for any company in any industry. However, while Amazon can deploy its own warehouse robots and trucks to ensure your new desk lamp arrives by Thursday, ExxonMobil relies on an entirely different distribution network to move its products from pipeline to refinery to tanker to gas station. So, the idea that “one supply chain strategy fits all” is as wrong-headed as thinking that an elephant looks like a tree.

A supply chain, boiled down to its basic elements, is the sequence of events and processes that take a product from dirt to dirt, in some cases literally. It encompasses a series of activities that people have engaged in since the dawn of commerce. Consider the supply chain General Mills manages for every box of cornflakes it sells: A farmer plants a certain number of corn seeds, cultivates and harvests a crop, sells the corn to a processing facility, where it is baked into cornflakes, then is packaged, warehoused to a distributor, transported to a retail store, put on a store shelf, sold to a consumer, and ultimately eaten. If the cornflakes are not sold by the expiration date on the box, then they are removed from the retailer's shelf and disposed of.

A supply chain, in other words, extends from the original supplier or source (the farmer and the seed) to the ultimate customer (the consumer who eats the cornflakes). So whether you're talking about an Intel semiconductor that begins its life as a grain of sand or a Ford Explorer that ends its life in a junkyard where its remaining usable components (tires, seat belts, headlights) are sold as parts, everything that happens in between those “dirt-to-dirt” milestones encompasses some aspect of the supply chain.

APICS Supply Chain Council, an organization that develops industry benchmarks and metrics, came up with a way to summarize the concept of supply chain management in just six words: plan, source, make, deliver, return, and enable.¹ While it's difficult to find a consensus in any field, let alone a field that intersects with so many disparate disciplines, that six-word definition has been accepted as the basic description of what a supply chain looks like and what its core functions are. (The Supply Chain Operations Reference, or SCOR, model is discussed in Chapter 3.)

For those who like a little sizzle with their steak, another industry group, the Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals (CSCMP), is a bit more descriptive with its definition: “Supply chain management encompasses the planning and management of all activities involved in sourcing and procurement, conversion, and all logistics management activities.” That includes coordinating and collaborating with channel partners, including suppliers, intermediaries, third parties, and customers. In short: “Supply chain management integrates supply and demand management within and across companies.”²