Designing Supply Chain Strategies

Daniel Dumke — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 06:54:00 +0000

In his fourth video podcasts Professor Richard Wilding talks about Supply Chain Strategies. I found it quite interesting, so I would like to give you a short summary of it here. If you are interested you can just download the podcast for free, you find a link in the reference section.

Hierarchy

Strategies are usually broken down into smaller pieces so that every function within a company has its own individual goals. This leads to some kind of hierarchy like:

Corporate Strategy
Competitive Strategy
for each market segment, mostly driven by marketing
Supply Chain Strategy
derived from the competitive strategy, has to be developed together with marketing to secure alignment

Elements of Supply Chain Strategy

The four key elements every Supply Chain Strategy is built on are

Process Design
Supply Chain Network Design
Information Systems
Organizational Structure

Management within a company has to design each Supply Chain Strategy individually for the respective markets considering the above mentioned categories.

Wilding mentions the example of a beer brewery which engages in business in the Europe vs. Africa. The goals from the strategies might be very different, focussing on responsibility in Europe vs. affordability in Africa.

Let me know what you think about Supply Chain Strategies in the comment section below!

Reference:

Podcast of Professor Richard Wilding of the Cranfield School of Management

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case study

strategy

structure

supply chain

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