Faced with excruciating competitive pressures, CEOs require maximum effort from every quarter of their organizations to survive. They typically use current strategies and tactics effectively, but just as typically, they overlook another key component for success: the enormous resoruces to be found and leveraged within their supplier companies.
Whether you are a CEO or a senior executive in any service or manufacutring company, this groundbreaking guide will show you how to awaken a sleeping giant: namely, the huge competitive advantages that astute supply management can offer. Using examples drawn from their own success or senior-level practitioners and innovators, the authors demonstrate how to retool your supply chain strategies and supplier relationship to achieve such measurable benefits as:
You particularly need this book if your organizatio, like so many others, has encouraged supplier relationships to become price-focused and adversarial-or if you still equate supply management with mere purchasing. While the latter focuses mainly on acquisitions, the the authors' total approach encompasses a three-tier life-cycle process that is fully illuminated in these pages:
1. Procurement. Evaualting the market, determining the best suppliers, meeting the company's cost and quality objectives, and consolidating the supply base.
2. Continuous improvement. Identifying opportunities for optimizing materials, service flow, and usage; implementing best practices; reducing total cost of ownership eliminating superfluous work.
3. Innovation. Breaking through to new levels of benefits and cost improvements through changes in processes, products, or technologies.
Executives in all kinds of companies—both service and manufacturing—are painfully aware of the pressing need to stretch resources and, at the same time, keep a competitive advantage. What many are not aware of is the tremendous financial benefit that can be realized through an important technique known as Supply Chain Management.
This breakthrough approach to procuring supplies, equipment—even raw materials—is well known to purchasing professionals. Now its cost savings will be abundantly clear to top decision makers. The book shows how to:
• get the best possible financial deal with suppliers
• apply implementation steps to set up airtight processes
• ask the right questions, use the right tools, and measure the results
• understand how Supply Chain Management fits into strategic planning
