Advanced Supply Chain Management: How to Build a Sustained Competitive Advantage

A useful and thought provoking text for supply / purchasing professionals looking for inspiration on how to improve their organisation, no matter how basic their organisation is - everybody has to start somewhere. Although mainly focussed on consumer / FMCG corporations Poirier writes in an entertaining and logical way, with plenty of case references to exemplify what he is explaining. Very relevant in these times of technicological change, poirier also explains how the web can enable supply networks to create a virtual "glass pipeline" of information.A "must read" if you are serious about transforming your organisation.

Cheers to Charles C. Poirier, who took a topic that almost cries out for unintelligible jargon and undecipherable graphs, and instead laid it plain, in common English, for all to understand. His essential notion: To achieve efficiencies you must develop a closer working relationship with the vendors that make up your supply chain. The goal is to share real-time inventory and production data so that your network of business partners - Poirier's supply-chain constellation - is better able to meet the end needs of the consumer. The major shortcoming of the book lies in its omission of information-based companies from its analysis. How can knowledge industry firms integrate their less tangible supply chains, and will they reap the same rewards as widget-makers if they do? Regardless, we [...] strongly recommend this book to anyone not an expert in the latest logistics-management techniques - and, unfortunately, that's almost everyone.

I felt that this book made some good points and presented a good framework for identifying where you are and where you need to get to. His framework of 4 levels of supply chain optimization: Sourcing & logistics and Internal excellence which are internal in nature and Network construction and Industry leadership which are external in nature contains some valid points. One point is the need to sequentially move through the levels instead of trying to jump right to the end. Another point is the need to continue moving in order to succeed. His point that all participants must share benefits from supply chain optimization is very accurate. I have seen at least 2 health care supply chain optimization efforts fail because of this issue. Finally, he doesn't claim that building a sustained competitive advantage is simple and he certainly doesn't try to give a cookbook approach for achieving it. A sustained competitive advantage is not a static achievement, it can only be maintained by taking an external view of supply chain optimization that is focused on building a value added community (or alliance) that enables: rapid, interactive, and successful product design and introduction; global available-to-promise capability with completely visible inventory; ability to assemble, build, or configure diverse components into a finished order; features of mass customization in the finished offering; a glass pipeline for viewing availability and flow of goods and services; analytical and financial feedback loops that accurately measure progress; continuous learning and improvement; etc....