Content area
Full Text
Today's leading businesses no longer operate in a vacuum. Complex relationships define and guide the evolution of transactions and work processes. Most global manufacturers not only have subsidiaries worldwide, they also have working partnerships with their customers and suppliers.
In today's knowledge-driven economy, access to information is the key to accurate and real-time decision-making. In this information-driven business environment, trading partners can no longer be viewed or treated as separate entities. These trading partners must have the tools to communicate and function in real time and in an integrated effort to serve the customer. Information systems must be able to provide flexibility, visibility, and effectiveness on a worldwide basis.
The Customer-Oriented Management System
In response to these industry requirements, Benchmarking Partners has created a customer-centric model for evaluating and synthesizing best business practices and information technology requirements: the Customer-Oriented Management System (COMS). The COMS model reorients the business entities or business processes to a customer-centric orientation. As shown in Figure 1, individual business entities and enterprise business processes are depicted as working in an integrated manner to simultaneously serve the customer.
A further decomposition of business processes and activities, unique to the specific trading partners' industry, is typically performed to identify specific customer-centric opportunities for business process and information systems improvement. This decomposition illustrates the source of complexity within the supply chain, which is unique to the specific industry being addressed (see Figure 2). Via the COMS framework, trading partners and functional areas of the business are integrated in dynamic relationships through access to common information.
The COMS model provides a powerful framework for assessing and adopting best business processes and information technology across the global value chain. Most organizations are familiar with the concept of the supply chain: the sequence of trading partners and business processes that deliver products and services to the customer. Just as critical, however, is the demand chain: motivating, planning, and committing to customer demand for goods and services. Together, these processes form the value chain: the complete set of value-adding activities that span the generation of demand through the fulfillment of that demand.
Supply, Demand, and Value Chain Strategies
Today's business environment, characterized by a quickened pace of business, demands a new fitness level for the firm that...