SUPPLY CHAIN AS STRATEGIC ASSET

Hands-on guidance for creating competitive advantages through strategy realization How can your supply chain create competitive advantages and help achieve business goals? Drawing from the author's abundant research and analysis, this resourceful book shows how aligning the supply chain design with business strategy helps build competitive capabilities, prioritize capital investments, and takes your firm beyond the industry best-practices to create competitive advantages, not just competitive parity. Summarizing the current literature on business and supply chain strategies, this book provides path-breaking new direction to build your own winning supply chain strategy. Real-life cases show how this strategy alignment has produced results for the most successful companies and how it can be achieved in your firm. * An overview of the concepts of business strategy, the current thinking on supply chain strategy and why it is inadequate to drive competitive advantage through supply chain design * Process for establishing your own supply chain strategy to build competitive advantage * The place of technology in creating business capabilities in modern corporations and why managing technology should be a core competence and an integral part of strategy planning * Step-by-step direction and examples for creating strategy alignment and designing a supply chain that goes beyond supporting your operations * Case studies including Wal-mart, Cemex, Kmart, HP, Dell, and others Consolidating the lessons learned along with implementation guidance, Supply Chain as Strategic Asset is the must-read road map for designing a supply chain that will be vital in achieving your business goals.

The book starts by summarizing the current literature on business, functional (supply chain), and technology strategies. Then, it establishes a case for why none of these strategies in isolation can create the competitive advantage needed to achieve the goals of the business and why they must be aligned and must work together to be effective. Every argument in the book is supported with cases from the industry. Some of the cases I have relied heavily are Wal-mart (business strategy of being a price leader drives supply chain strategy to reduce costs), Cemex (business strategy of differentiation drives supply chain that is customer centric), and several other industry examples (Avon, Tyco, Rubbermaid, etc.) as they fit the argument being made at the time. The book concludes by consolidating the lessons learned and implementation guidance on how the 3 strategies and be pulled together resulting in a strategic roadmap.

Hands-on guidance for creating competitive advantages through strategy realization How can your supply chain create competitive advantages and help achieve business goals? Drawing from the author's abundant research and analysis, this resourceful book shows how aligning the supply chain design with business strategy helps build competitive capabilities, prioritize capital investments, and takes your firm beyond the industry best-practices to create competitive advantages, not just competitive parity. Summarizing the current literature on business and supply chain strategies, this book provides path-breaking new direction to build your own winning supply chain strategy. Real-life cases show how this strategy alignment has produced results for the most successful companies and how it can be achieved in your firm. An overview of the concepts of business strategy, the current thinking on supply chain strategy and why it is inadequate to drive competitive advantage through supply chain design Process for establishing your own supply chain strategy to build competitive advantage The place of technology in creating business capabilities in modern corporations and why managing technology should be a core competence and an integral part of strategy planning Step-by-step direction and examples for creating strategy alignment and designing a supply chain that goes beyond supporting your operations Case studies including Wal-mart, Cemex, Kmart, HP, Dell, and others Consolidating the lessons learned along with implementation guidance, Supply Chain as Strategic Asset is the must-read road map for designing a supply chain that will be vital in achieving your business goals.