Community Supply Chain Solutions CEOs

A brief overview of the benefits of multi-party solutions for CEOs

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“As customer preferences change, competitors falter, opportunities to gain distressed assets emerge, and governments shift from crisis control to economic stimulus, the next year or two will probably produce new laggards, leaders, and industry dynamics. The future will belong to companies whose senior executives remain calm, carefully assess their options, and nurture the flexibility, awareness, and resiliency needed to deal with whatever the world throws at them.”

December 2008
McKinsey Global Institute

More flexible

As consumers are retrenched and the global economy slows, executives need greater flexibility to create strategic and tactical options that they can use defensively and offensively as conditions change. In this age of global-connected enterprises, the complexity and sprawl of trading partners has undermined flexibility. Many companies still operate in multi-tier, buy-sell, rigid-transactional relationships across partners that contributes to process latencies, lack of responsiveness, and poor innovation, while adding unnecessary inventory and costs.  In this age of responsible-consumption, there is a better way. 

One Network provides on-demand solutions for demand and supply networks. The business processes are fluid across the entities - much like social networking- they come together for certain projects and break apart, each relationship is different and cannot be predicted or pre-defined. The overall relationship may continue, but the details may vary based on the conditions of product lifecycle, project, service, competition, credit, regional constraints, etc. The ability to respond to such conditions before your competition will dictate if one survives or even prospers.

More aware

According to a Conference Board survey, excellence in execution is one of the top CEO challenges, which is even more germane in these profoundly uncertain times. Companies need quick and surgical awareness of their own positions, and the positions of their competitors and trading partners. With the economic turmoil in Q4 of 2008, one of our customers noticed that private-labels at their retail partners were garnering the market share – they were able to quickly shift from premium brands to value, cut costs, and re-align all the network partners - sales, distribution, logistics, and co-manufacturers in China in a matter of days. Not only were they able to reduce the number of touch points to compete with private labels, but they pulled off a promotion that gained them 16% more revenue than planned, due to the synchronization of internal parties and external enterprises with actual daily, shelf consumption signals.

More resilient

Executives need to take this opportunity to break ingrained structures, duplicated wasteful practices, and internally focused roles, and prepare the organization for the 21st century business reality - what C.K. Prahalad calls in his latest book, “The new age of innovation – driving co-created value through global networks.” The focus needs to shift to the individual customer experience and draw resources from anywhere within the trading partner network to achieve and sustain continuous change and innovation.