“If you go live on schedule based on where you are now, you will fail. You won’t be able to ship product, and you will lose hundreds of millions of dollars.” That was the blunt assessment put before the CEO and CIO. They'd been told by their internal project managers that 80 percent of the necessary planning and documentation had been completed, and that the upgrade of seven business units to SAP ECC 6.0 would be ready to launch in 18 months. Just to be sure the CIO had asked an outside consulting firm to assess the team's progress.

As business leaders we are accountable to our customers, shareholders and stakeholders. Business value, whether real or perceived, is derived from the predictability and sustainability of business outcomes. It lives, healthy or sick, in those gaps between expected vs. perceived vs. actual performance. Value is articulated by measuring what is being managed. As businesspeople we manage strategy, structure (including human capital), and process, and measure their outcome, called performance. Those who have applied the Supply Chain Operations Reference-model (SCOR®) to help with problem solving, continuous process improvement, process redesign or even business process engineering, understand that SCOR is a great enabler for aligning a company’s portfolio of improvement projects to its overall strategic goals and objectives. A company’s annual strategic thrusts are manifested in its vertical process integration (management-led programs for doing the right things, as defined by the customer) and its horizontal process integration (leadership-led programs for doing the right things well, as defined by capabilities).

Source: SRA International

Discussions for the extensions of SCOR have identified four key domains (or macro processes) every organization or company must address: supply chain (key process: fulfillment excellence), design chain (key process: product line sustainability), customer chain (key process: achieving customer intimacy, internally and externally) and product/portfolio chain management (key process: life cycle management). Tremendous strides have been made recently with the convergence of SCOR with the Design Chain Operations Reference-model (DCOR^SM) that can be applied to all industries. In the defense environment, where I predominately work, this convergence is helping to move from an acquisition-centric to a sustainment-centric environment. When the Customer-Chain Operations Reference-model (CCOR^SM) is added, all three models (SCOR, DCOR, CCOR) provide a compelling enabler that lends itself to what the U.S. Department of Defense calls “total life cycle system management” and what industry calls "product life cycle management." The set of rules established by an SCC project team several years ago to define how the frameworks can be converged is called “xCOR.” I refer to this operational convergence of SCOR, DCOR and CCOR as "Interlock." Interlock becomes primarily meaningful within this context not by simply linking inputs and outputs but by linking behaviors at the workflow level. This results in what SCC progressives call deterministic workflows. An example of this is shown below.

Source: SRA International

To explain what's meant by deterministic workflows, each level three activity illustrated above has a suite of process definitions, metrics, and best practices associated with it. As companies look to align goals with improvement projects that shorten lead time, reduce costs or spin assets more quickly, Interlock can ensure that what is being managed can be measured end to end. Whether you are a salesman, an engineer or an operations type, you deterministically plan requirements against resources, you research and integrate concepts and ideas, you have to relate to somebody to sell your solutions, and gain consensus (contract) with your internal or external customer. Finally, you have to deliver something to somebody reliably and responsively without incurring excessive costs, whether it is a sales report or a finished good. A supply chain manager who is designing a new supply chain network is actually following DCOR process steps, which have metrics, best practices and process definitions. That same manager has to “relate, sell and gain consensus (contract)” for his ideas internally to named, intermediary or grouped accounts. Applying this principle of deterministic workflow will revolutionize your understanding and enable your application of the Supply Chain Council family of business process reference models.