Designing your Supply Chain 

In the 1990’s, and with the rise of the concept of Supply Chain Management, supply chains have gone global. Creating a global supply chain forced companies to consider the strategic choices they made when designing their supply chain.

Globalization has included suppliers in many different countries, setting up warehouses to serve global customers, creating transportation systems to move goods around the world and moving production facilities to best-cost countries. Examples of best cost countries are Germany and Japan for machinery, the USA for sophisticated hardware and software design, China for high labor content products and large heavy industry, Korea for ship building and large heavy industry, India for lower-value software design, France and Italy for fashion luxury goods, and others.

However, these decisions are not only for global supply chain design.  Whether you operate regionally, nationally or globally, you will make decisions about your supply chain… by design or default.  Fortunately, Supply Chain researchers have documented these choices into 15 decisions.   The attached link to a white-paper briefly explains the 15 choices that can help you optimize your supply chain (minimize cost and maximize customer service). The 15 choices are:

1. Consolidation
2. Postponement
3. Responsiveness
4. Lean-ness
5. Agility
6. Adaptability
7. Flexibility
8. Speed
9. Value Contribution
10. Core Competency
11. Differentiation
12. Collaboration
13. Hedging
14. Redundancy
15. Diversification