A great place to start is with a diagnostic or benchmarking exercise in order to understand what the true state of your supply chain is and how it compares to current best practices.
This allows you to decide, based on your particular business strategy, which elements of your supply chain you will target for improvement.
It is important to remember that it is dysfunctional to try to optimize all elements – the business strategy must be the guiding light on this.
There is a comprehensive set of supply chain diagnostic and benchmarking tools available through WERC and CSCMP that can provide you with a great starting point. These have been produced by Kate Vitasek and her team at Supply Chain Visions.
The ones I recommend are:
- The Supply Chain Management Process Standards available from CSCMP – there are 6 of these covering the Plan, Source, Make, Deliver, Enable and Return aspects of the supply chain.
- Warehousing and Fulfilment Process Benchmark and Best Practices Guide available from WERC
- Warehouse Manager’s Guide to Benchmarking available from WERC.
They can all be purchased online through WERC and CSCMP. Here are the links www.werc.org and www.cscmp.org.
