Collaborate, Collaborate, Collaborate, Collaborate V
Recently, Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC), Supply Chain Management Review (SCMR), and Michigan State University (MSU) released the Fifth Annual Global Survey of Supply Chain Progress.
The report measured the performance of firms along eight dimensions of supply chain competence:
- Alignment with Business Strategy
- Strategic Customer Integration
- Strategic Supplier Integration
- Cross-Functional Internal Integration
- Supply Chain Responsiveness
- Planning & Execution Process & Technology
- Supply Chain Rationalization / Segmentation
- Risk Management
The report found that the less mature companies needed to focus on greater collaboration with business partners and pay more attention to areas of weakness. Another mark of leaders was greater strategic alignment and significant, positive, involvement of top managers.
But I think it's pretty obvious that collaboration is the ultimate key. What better way to mutually identify and improve the areas of weakness? What better way to improve strategic alignment? What better way to maximize the positive involvement of management? Furthermore, without collaboration, you'll never truly achieve strategic integration between customers, suppliers, or internal departments.
So you want to achieve collaboration, but aren't sure how to sell it? A recent CAPS Research study by Stanley Fawcett, Gregory Magnan, and Jeffrey Ogden, as summarized in How to Manage Supply Chain Collaboration, puts forward a three step process to identify and compare the benefits, barriers and bridges to assess and communicate the viability of pursuing a path toward collaborative advantage. The three stages are as follows:
- Introspection
A company's orientation and philosophy consists of two building blocks: customer orientation and systems thinking orientation. - Supply Chain Design
A five step process: scan, map, cost, manage competency, and rationalize - Supply Chain Collaboration Relationship alignment, information sharing, performance measurement, people empowerment, and collaborative learning.
By figuring out where your company is, and then working your way through a proper supply chain design planning exercise, you'll be in a position to align your relationships, share information, measure your performance, and progress collaboratively.
That all sounds nice and neat. But the more I look into so-called "mature" supply chain organisations, the more I doubt their claims of success. It seems a lot of the so-called success stories are coming from people with a vested interest in self-reporting success. It's much uglier when you peel back the claims and focus on the reality. A lot of organisations don't even have a believable baseline, so how can they claim savings?
You can wax eloquently about collaboration and other high level concepts, but excuse me while I stifle a yawn. Garbage data in, garbage conclusions out.
A serious question for the Doctor.
What is "collaboration"?
How is collaboration measured? Is there a CI (Collaboration Index)?
How do you know if you have collaboration?
Are there symptoms that indicate there may be collaboration in your system?
Is there a prescription for increasing collaboration?
I'm getting ahead of myself. Back to the first question - Exactly, what is collaboration?
the doctor is going to refer you back to his blogologue of November 26:
http://blog.sourcinginnovation.com/2007/11/26/the-doctor-goes-mental-on-myths-i-collaboration--knowledge-sharing.aspx