As organizations evolve their business models in the coming decade, a new breed of business and technology leaders emerges to meet the challenge. These leaders will navigate a myriad of converging and disruptive technologies, align new initiatives for both business value and technology feasibility, and identify strategies to leverage existing investments to fund innovation. Consequently, traditional supply chain operations also need to evolve along with new roles and focuses for the CSCO. Later in 2011, additional research will be conducted into these new roles.
This initial Constellation Research supply chain report focuses on supply chain synergy, summarizing a significant body of work. The second report in this series will include real world pilot examples and direct improvement results. Questions about the types of supply chain synergy present in supply chains as well as the Supply Chain Synergy Indicators that identify these synergies will be answered.
Supply chain standards are a key prerequisite for accessing supply chain synergies once they have been identified and also act as the foundation for the synchronization process. Eight dimensions across which supply chains can be synchronized to harvest these synergies are also defined as well as a number of cultural issues that pose a challenge to successful synchronization.
Part two of this series of reports will deliver details on case studies demonstrating specific methodologies, standards, technologies and results from four significant supply chain synergy implementations both past and present. Part three will outline the cultural issues in supply chain synchronization — implementation of these end-to-end synergy driven supply chain networks in a scalable and sustainable way. Following the sharing of these examples, part four of this “Search for Synergy in Supply Chain” series will address the challenges for scalability and sustained implementation of a supply chain synergy approach. This will include the introduction of semantic data into the supply chain, social networking facilitation, and roll out of our Constellation Research Supply Chain Synergy Survey.