Category Archives: Miscellaneous

Effective Policy Deployment Process

As per this recent article in Industry Week on “planning an effective policy deployment process”, there is a difference between a strategic plan and strategy deployment. While a strategic plan is a three- to five-year vision of where you want an organization to be, strategy deployment is the one-year plan or process instituted to break down that vision into short-term goals that can be assigned, measured, provided with resources, and revisited to determine progress.

While short, it was an important article because many supply chain process improvements fail due to poor execution, which boils down to a failure to not only manage the change, but break the change down into manageable chunks that can be assigned, measured, provided with resources, and implemented in reasonably short time periods to demonstrate progress and interim success before enthusiasm for the initiative wears off.

In other words, the key to effective policy deployment is in the details. A long term vision is important, but so is a manageable path to get there that takes into account the timeframe that will be required which, as per Bob’s recent article on Procurement and Supply Chain Transformation: How Fast, will generally take a good 18 to 36 months.

106 Discrete Steps to Global Trade

Stanford University Professors Warren Hausman and Hau Lee recently decided that an end-to-end model was required for global trade management and decided to research the requirements. Analyzing imported goods from Asia to the US in the apparel sector, Hausman and Lee identified 106 discrete steps in the global trade management process. One Hundred and Six. Wow!

They also found ample opportunities for ROI for investment and improvement of global trade processes. Specifically, they estimated that importers actively using Asian sourcing had an opportunity through automation to reduce their supply chain costs by a range of 0.6-2.2% of annual sales. This is a substantial level versus average corporate net profit margins in the apparel sector. For instance, at an average profit margin of about 6%, such a decrease in costs would boost the corporate bottom line by 10% – 37%.

So, if you have IT-enabled global trade management, you:

  • have enhanced efficiency
    as you don’t have to manually execute 106 steps
  • are significantly safer
    the visibility lets you corrupt hiccups before they become costly seven or eight figure disruptions
  • have profits a-plenty
    as you’ve just increased the bottom line by 10% to 40%

So if you don’t have one, go get yourself a GTM solution today! Need a provider listing, start with the resource site.

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Browser Wars — For the Techie in All of Us

A recent visualization over on Axiis, the open source data visualization framework, displays the W3.org’s Historical Browser Statistics from January 2002 to August 2009. It’s definitely worth checking out … you can see the rise and fall of Mozilla, Netscape, IE, AOL, Opera, Firefox, Safari, and Chrome over time.

Hat-Tip to Matthieu Cormier, of Cocoa Mondo, a fellow Haligonian.

The Value of Capability Coherence in One Industry

A recent article in Strategy+Business on Cut Costs, Grow Stronger had the following graph which I think is just great:

Any guesses as to what most of the companies on the line (and, specifically, those closer to the upper right of the line) have in common? Anyone?

These companies were all early adopters of strategic sourcing decision optimization. Think about it.

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