What you need to know about supply chain management: while there are the occasional horror stories about botched SCM implementations, if you have a good understanding of what you want to achieve and a measured approach to implementation, you can prevent the nightmare from featuring your company

Automotive Design & Production, Feb, 2005 by Lawrence S. Gould

* Identify the required business processes, geographic coverage, material flows, and other aspects of the desired supply chain. Also identify the measurements that determine the supply chain's "goodness." "Translate the measurements for 'goodness' back into dollars toward a business objective," emphasizes Stephens. These measurements will eventually be one of the key metrics for ROI analysis, especially in the purchase of new IT. White adds, "Focus 80% of your management and investment time on the core stuff, and recognize the rest of it is still important, but don't put all your resources and bucks there."

* Translate the supply-chain requirements into supply-chain transactions, and then into software (and hardware). Get help by collaborating with the enterprise's own IT group and similar groups among your trading partners up and down the supply chain, or by partnering with consultants or a business enterprise software vendor. Better, collaborate with all of the above.

* Implement the enabling technology.

* Keep the translation of supply-chain requirements to technology an iterative process. People tend not to continually revisit their initial business requirements both during the definition phase of the implementation project and during its progress, warns Stephens. "These requirements are what keep you from experiencing scope creep."

All in all, Stephens does not doubt that over the last five to ten years, SCM has become easier to implement. "There are more tools for implementation. The packages are better defined as to what they can and cannot do. And the software systems tend to be more capable, more robust, and more scalable."

By Lawrence S. Gould, Contributing Editor