Supply Chain Performance Supply Chain Indeed, Comprehensive

Supply Chain Performance

Supply chain

Indeed, comprehensive measures of supply chain performance including total chain cost can sometimes becomes difficult to develop due to the fact that as the product gets to be known within the market, there can be a fluctuation in demand with large decrease at some points. Supply chain metrics have been associated with internal logistics measures. Failure to have widely accepted definition for supply chain management as well as the complexity in terms of overlapping supply chains make it difficult for the development of supply chain.

This development can be difficult due to the failure in applying the right metrics that can manage supply chains effectively. Generally, the major challenge is finding and implementing the right metrics in supply chain management. It may be disputes regarding the right metrics between products lines or departments in the company, supply chains, having too many metrics or too few metrics, coming to a solution on the definitions and calculations, benchmarking difficulties as well as difficulties in finding the right metrics that are supported of-the-shelf in reporting tools.

In prioritizing supply chain improvement efforts, companies find it difficult to come up with the correct area to deploy their expert resources and in what sequence, having scarce problem solvers who are supposed to be working on the problems that have the greatest impact on the supply performance. (Bytheway, A., 1995a). For example lack of fact-based prioritization, lack of standard approach, limited skills/capabilities and to only few key individuals, as well as internal politics.

Lagging behind in terms of performance is also a factor to difficulty in chain supply development. Performance gap is experienced whether in need to improve customer satisfaction, need to reduce costs or inventory, or need to increase speed to respond to market changes. The struggle can be on the ways of improving the performance of a lagging metric without impacting the rest of the keys negatively.

Supply chains complexity: When there are several different customers with broad range of products and services, there might be complexity in network supply, global, warehouses, factories, customers, transporters, among others. As a result of complexity of this network, it becomes difficult to unravel and find where exactly and why problems occur, (Lee, H.L. And Billington, C., 1992). It might be accompanied by lack of knowledge about what the supply chains are, the right number of supply chains.

Finally, difficulty is experience when finding and holding on to supply chain talent. As much as most of the companies can now accept and understand function of supply chain management, it becomes difficult to find true supply chain talent. As we know that supply chain management covers numerous disciplines, it can be sometimes hard to find such all-round supply chain person. The company might have few staffs that have deep and wide knowledge of sourcing, planning, manufacturing, distribution as well as order management functions, (Beamon, B.M., 1996). Sometimes even getting staffs with capacity to see the supply chain as a whole. Such problems include getting the right people, lowering attrition and developing hiring process, training as well as redeployment plans.

However there can be ways of countering these difficulties which exists in developing such a comprehensive measures of supply chain performance and use of SCOR among other ways is much recommended. Where there are disputes on the right metrics, SCOR metrics is the de facto standard for measurement. This provides an opportunity for a company to move their discussion away from what to measure and ways of calculation to just selecting metrics from a list. In addition, SCOR has been integrated by software companies within their dashboard and scorecard solutions and there is availability of benchmarks. SCOR also assist in establishing the processes for identification and prioritization of the company's key resources. For example they can adopt M4SC so that they can identify and develop strategic supply chain management initiatives.