Book Review: Advanced Supply Chain Management

Every economic developer should understand the ins and outs of supply chain management. It is the key to understanding how your area is connected to other places across the global. Here is a book that can help: Advanced Supply Chain Management, by Charles C. Poirier. It's six years old, but rich in wisdom.

Here is Poirier's central message. Your supply chain holds the answer to your business woes. The key to growing your business is not your strategies, your technology, or your people. It is your ability to manage the chain of vital inputs that you need to create your product and services. Every company has one, and every company relies on one for its survival — but not every company realizes that the secret to its long-term success lies in its ability to improve and perfect its supply chain.

Efforts to bolster supply chain management have been going on for over a decade. Alternatively called logistics reengineering, process redesign, or distribution-channel improvement, they all aim at the same target: reducing costs by improving the logistics of purchase and distribution of vital resources. Today’s successful companies have formed networks for sourcing raw materials, storing and distributing products, and ultimately delivering them to the customer. This is the essence of supply-chain management. In the past, these efforts focused on what the company could do internally to make the process more efficient. Unfortunately, this approach limits the effectiveness of your supply chain, and impairs your ability to compete.

If you want to advance to the head of the supply-chain management process, you will have to commit to a process and not expect to take one great leap forward. Each step along the way must build on earlier initiatives. The cultural change required to share information with new business partners is not to be underestimated. You can accelerate your company’s transition through the early phases to the advanced stages. Do not assume increased efficiencies at each stage, however, since First-Level economic improvements have been shown to be largely fictitious.

Want to know more? Buy the book at Amazon.com here.