Measurement as a Path to Success

A favorite topic of mine.  Improving measurement can lead to better results, even if you don't apply advanced analytics to the measurements.  Because measurement leads to control.

 " ... Measuring Your Way to Success in Procurement and Supply Management
“Measurement is the first step that leads to control and eventually to improvement.” – H. James Harrington, CEO of the Harrington Institute.

Across the years, companies have traditionally and exclusively measured their success in terms of financial achievements. In the rapidly emerging business world it appeared the need for a much broader range of measures, in order to keep companies and organizations on track into achieving their goals. This is how the fulminating interest in dashboards, scorecards and KPIs can be explained, and Procurement and Supply Management is no different. .... "

Complex Global Supply Chains

In GigaOM:  " ...  Thanks to the growth of 3D printing, intelligent robots, and open-source hardware, tomorrow’s supply chains will be faster, smaller, cheaper, and local. ... " .   I agree that 3D printing will make strides in the near future.  3D printing technology will also allow us to differentiate items as well, minimizing what we need to ship.  Many items will thus be remotely manufactured by transmitting bits rather than entire item..   But we still need large and complex items that are composed of atoms, and get these to the right place.  Note my other explorations in this space.

Bit vs Atoms in the Supply Chain

On Bits vs atoms:  Nothing new here, our enterprise did this for years, and is one of the supporters of this effort, the post below does give a good overview of the intent, but not any technical details.  It is though, all about collaborative analytics:

" ... the goal of the physical internet initiative is to improve logistics performance in terms costs and service. It believes this can be done by improving "horizontal" collaboration - that is, collaboration across players in the same echelon of the supply chain - perhaps competitors - by in part sharing logistics/transportation resources. At the same time, such an approach can also go a long way to meeting the Global Logistics Sustainability Grand Challenge, the title of an academic article in 2011 that also talks about the physical internet.

Now, the potential for logistics collaboration is nothing new. The concept and potential benefits have been well understood for years. Anecdotally, the level of such collaboration has recently seemed to have increased, driven primarily by Green imperatives. But, there are barriers, and the practice is still minimal. What this research is trying to do is to better quantify a wide ranges of benefits from such collaboration, and then take the idea even further by some fairly radical concepts around how to better modularize and integrate the supply chain ... " 

Multi National Supply Chains in China

In Knowledge@Wharton:  (In English and Chinese).  " ... Chinese Supply Chains Reach an ‘Inflection Point’ – and Multinationals Recast Strategies ... "   Precisely what we modeled in the late 2000's using complexity and agent modeling techniques.  We did not predict this coming, but could have used the same simulation models to help understand the implications of these changes.