Value Chain Excellence   SUPPLY CHAIN "KICKED UP A NOTCH" OR A RECIPE FOR BUSINESS PROCESS MANAGEMENT Earlier this year I had the opportunity to facilitate a Business Executive Forum focused on supply chain trends. The conversation was couched in the context of “big business questions” executives are asking today. Our dialogue centered more on the concept of “value chain” than supply chain. Toward the end of the discussion, I was asked two questions that eventually propelled me on a research journey. The first question went something like, “what is a value chain? And the second followed, “how can a company improve one relative to our Big Business Question?”   Big Business Questions Why am I not growing at the rate I want? Why am I missing my gross margin expectations? Why are my customers unhappy? Where is my cash? Why are my overhead expenses growing faster than revenue? Insert YOUR BIG question here… .       WHAT IS A VALUE CHAIN?  A Value Chain is the integrated macro processes of Marketing, Design, Supply, and Customer. A Value Chain spans from Markets (of supply and demand) to Your Company to Your Customer (ultimate buyer of your products). A Value Chain is comprised of four dimensions including Strategy, Product Flow, Work Flow, and Information Flow. As with the SCOR™, a company must align all four dimensions in an improvement effort. Figure 1 attempts to put the four frameworks together in high level process relationship map. As illustrated in the diagram, each process relates to its Markets, other macro processes in Your Company, and to Customers through key inputs and outputs. The picture is far from perfect; the process relationships are far more complex and dynamic than the series of inputs and outputs suggest. In fact, I’m 100% positive there will be many edits to this picture with time and project repetitions this year. But it is a place to start.       REFERENCES Porter, M.E. (1985). Competitive Advantage: Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance. New York: The Free Press. The Supply-Chain Council. (2004). Overview of the SCOR Model version 6.1: http://www.supply-chain.org/public/pressrelease061704_scor6.1.asp. Pittsburgh, PA: The Supply-Chain Council. The Supply-Chain Council. (2004). Customer-Chain Council Established as Special Interest Group within Supply-Chain Council: Focus on Customer-Chain Operations Reference-model (CCOR), http://www.supply-chain.org/public/pressrelease060404_ccc.asp. Pittsburgh, PA: The Supply-Chain Council. The Supply-Chain Council. (2004). Design-Chain Council Established as a Special Interest Group within the Supply-Chain Council: Focus on Design Chain Issues and the Design-Chain Operations Reference-Model, http://www.supply-chain.org/public/pressrelease060404.asp. Pittsburgh, PA: The Supply-Chain Council. The Balanced Scorecard Institute, Cary, NC and Rockville, MD USA. (919) 460 8180 or (301) 816 0909. http://www.balancedscorecard.org/       VALUE CHAIN MACRO PROCESSES       VALUE CHAIN EXCELLENCE PROJECT       VALUE CHAIN METRICS		HOME   RESOURCES   THOUGHT LEADERSHIP   BENCHMARK SOURCES   BENCHMARK BRIEFS   WEBSITES   ARTICLES   PRESENTATIONS   SCE PROJECT TEMPLATES   VALUE CHAIN EXCELLENCE