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A new survey from CSC and Supply Chain Management Review charts the progress that companies have made to date in advancing their supply chain-and points to the considerable work that still needs to be done. From a competitive standpoint, the good news is that with a handful of exceptions, most companies are at about the same stage of evolution.
Everyone talks about the importance of supply chain management, but how much progress have companies actually made in advancing their supply chain capabilities? Based on extensive research, a review of the literature and case studies, and hands-on application work, we believe that this question can be answered from three perspectives.
Prom one aspect, leading companies are jumping ahead of their slower rivals and are establishing positions of dominance, based in large part on their ability to work collaboratively with carefully selected trading partners. At this advanced level, the linked partners have achieved online visibility, interenterprisc collaboration, and leading-edge application of technology to gain the most benefit from their supply chain initiatives. Boeing, Colgate-Palmolive, Wal-Mart, Intel, Kraft Foods, and Procter & Gamble are examples of companies in this category.
In contrast, some companies have focused their supply chain efforts entirely inwardly. They have relied on internally generated process improvements aimed at reducing costs in specific functional areas. Though these efforts have been beneficial, they fall well short of the solid bottom-line gains recorded by the industry leaders. The forest products and construction industries tend to exemplify this second category.
In between, we find the majority of companies. They have made considerable progress integrating their internal process activities and may have taken initial steps to extend this integration to a few of their external partners. But they are still struggling to reach the more advanced stage of supply chain management, in which collaboration and the use of digital commerce and other cyber-based communication techniques are applied with external partners.
In an effort to validate these observations and assess the true progress of supply chain management (SCM), Computer Sciences Corp. (CSC) and Supply Chain Management Review jointly conducted a survey among supply chain professionals. Our aim was to chart this progress against a framework developed by CSC that calibrates advancement on five levels of supply chain evolution. (Those...