How far have CEOs grasped the changing nature of supply chain management, asks Andrew Cave?
In this series, we have discussed how building trust and dependency within supply chains can lay the foundations for collaborative arrangements that go well beyond the simple functions that supply chains were initially designed to fulfil. We saw how such collaboration could overcome traditional boundaries between companies and suppliers, businesses and their customers and even companies and their commercial rivals. This type of co-operation, including the sharing of proprietary information to competitors could break down barriers between design and manufacture, retail and distribution and storage and transportation to produce worthwhile cost savings. At the same time, it could liberate departments, staff and contractors to think in new ways and encourage innovation that benefited all sides of such an arrangement. We explored varieties of collaboration, how to manage and control the chain and looks at where the main risks lie. Then we examined how far up the boardroom agenda supply chai
