I used to say that the three greatest inventions of mankind was the round wheel, the window screen and air conditioning. I have to add a fourth now. The Internet. As I prepare to instruct another SCOR Workshop series to be conducted in Baltimore next month, I am continuously amazed how the Internet has introduced me to people around the world that otherwise I probably would never have met. Supply Chain Management is a language unto itself that can unite people together. Principled thinking allows trading partners to behave for the good of the end to end supply chain.

When you ask supply chain managers which of the metrics (or attributes) are most important for their supply chain, cost score high on their list. We know that cost management is a key focus area for those practicing supply chain management as supply chain cost are generally the largest cost component in operating a business. We continue to receive feedback that the cost metrics in SCOR today aren’t as clear or as easy to explain as we would like them to be.

As I enter my fifth decade of work (yousa), I have had the opportunity to work with some terrific professionals.  They taught me two phrases that seem to survive time. "Change is constant" and "If you always do what you have always done, then you will always receive what you have always gotten". Digging deeper into these cliches, you might argue that how can you always receive the same results if change is constant? Ah, the mysteries of life. Welcome back to our series on using file structures to support the SCOR Project Roadmap. In this c

Flying this week, I had my iPad full of magazines to keep me comfortably occupied in what to me are increasingly small seats - perhaps an indication of becoming older, or at least wider - and I was struck by the volume of references to Supply Chain across a wide spectrum of publications. Of course, the catastrophe in Japan, and the subsequent disruption of global supply chains relying on components coming from Japan, is an impetus for some discussion.

Did your recent project require you to draw a geographic materials flow diagram (aka geo map)? Did you have the same problem I have had; where to get a good image to use as geographic background? Well, I have some good news. A new service allows you to create a Google Maps image with the nodes already copied in. You simply need to add the flows and/or node names.

Here's how it works:

Many tools and methodologies exist today to analyze and manage the different challenges that must be addressed in order for a company to remain at the competitive edge. Working on any area in isolation, however, can lead managers down a path to sub-optimization.  Full optimization requires business and supply chain leaders to listen to five voices:

I hope everyone had a terrific holiday season. At minimum, I would describe this winter as intense for those of us living in the northeast United States. Most of us have anywhere from two to five feet of snow on the ground. It doesn't seem to be melting, and more is on the way!

Over the past two weeks I have had the pleasure of meeting with senior executives from a variety of companies in training situations where we could talk freely and discover opportunities within their businesses for improving their supply chains. Our trainings—particularly in-house training—take a practical, hands-on focus to supply chain improvement. Managers frequently leave the trainings with specific ideas and improvement programs laid out and ready to go.

Late in 2010 I had the pleasure of an intense travel itinerary through Australia and New Zealand. There, I met hundreds of supply chain professionals who were interested in SCC and my presentation topic, "The New Reality" of Supply Chain Management, which is a compilation of the key trends that emerged from our recent Executive Summit. On a personal level, it was refreshing to be in the Southern Hemisphere in the summertime for once. 

"Oh that's just standard SCOR."  Precisely!  Too many folks want to differentiate themselves among the Supply Chain Operations Reference Model Body of Knowledge (SCORBOK) rather than apply the SCOR Project Roadmap as taught.