Program Abstract

Many individual business have gone as far as they can on their own to remove costs from the supply chain. Once you've implemented lean processed and leveraged technology effectively to integrate supply, demand, and inventory control, there may be little more you can do within the four walls of your organization to take costs out of the supply chain.

But in many industries and for many types of products, companies no longer compete directly with one another. Instead the competition is supply chain vs. supply chain. The winners then become not simply those companies that are most efficient but those supply chains whose members work together most effectively.

In this session, Jack Shaw shows how the companies who comprise the most effective supply chains take additional costs out of their supply chains through collaborative supply chain event management. Collaboration is far more than simply an agreement to cooperate -- although that is a critical first step.

Collaboration means the sharing of key supply, demand, and inventory information among partners up and down the supply chain -- and in real time. It also means using tools like Activity Based Costing to manage costs on an apples-to-apples basis across the supply chain.

Jack will show your attendees how supply chain leaders are employing the concept of Net Chain Benefit (NCB) to identify areas for process improvement across the extended enterprise. In addition, NCB helps determine the economic viability of proposed process improvements and provides a means to track ROI once improvements have been implemented. Trading partners can also use NCB to track the economic health of the supply chain as a whole - a holistic approach to collaborative supply chain management.   

The use of NCB is an acknowledgment of the fact that decisions are never made in a vacuum. On the contrary, decisions made by supply chain members often have ripple effects that are felt at every tier in the chain. With NCB, each supply chain member measures the impact of these ripples on each connected trading partner and on the supply chain as a whole. Thus, the chain is treated as an entity in and of itself - somewhat comparable to a holding company that derives its profits from a collection of subsidiaries.

This approach to collaborative supply chain management allows supply chain participants to measure the value added by each supply chain partner and thus to identify optimal means for sharing the benefits of supply chain improvements. This aligns the interests of the individual partners with the economic vitality of the supply chain as a whole. As a result, every member of the supply chain can take a strategic view of the supply chain -- understanding that what is good for the whole is good for the parts and vice versa.