Supply Chain Optimization: Building the Strongest Total Business Network

Supply Chain Optimization illustrates how companies that create, distribute, and sell products or services can join forces to establish a supply network with an unbeatable competitive advantage. Poirier and Reiter explain how companies can successfully employ partnering, rather than working on improvements in isolation, to identify high opportunity initiatives across a total supply network. By applying key resources on focused opportunities and sharing the resulting savings, members of the network get larger results, faster, as well as funding for future efforts.

At the heart of Poirier's and Reiter's plan is a four-step model to mobilize joint effort and focus resources from suppliers, manufacturers, distributors, and retailers on initiatives that have a high pay-back potential. The authors have studied the successes of such influential retailers as Wal-Mart, K-Mart, Target, and Sears, all of which are laying the groundwork for how to use point-of-sale data to create quick-response alliances with selected suppliers who will take responsibility for replenishing stock to predetermined levels. Supply Chain Optimization explains how to develop such effective partnering techniques and demystifies the electronic data linkages that are necessary to make them work.

Supply Chain Optimization offers survival tools for companies of all sizes. The authors describe consortiums, or "share groups," of smaller companies that can compete with the volume leverage of large corporations, superstores, and warehouse stores. By analyzing their shared supply chain and pooling their available resources, these consortiums can find hidden savings to protect their profit margins and remain competitive in today's marketplace.

The book includes case studies that show what a wide range of companies are actually doing to achieve supply chain optimization. Companies profiled include: Financing Division of General Electric, Dial Corporation, Proctor & Gamble, Baxter Healthcare Corporation, Navistar/Goodyear, Packaging Corporation of America, Dominick's, Hart Mountain Corporation, and General Motors--Saturn.

Partnering requires more than technological expertise. Successful partnerships display high levels of cooperation expressed by the sharing of resources, time, energy, and the benefits achieved. Poirier and Reiter describe the many pitfalls that must be avoided, and create a vision of how firms can build on their existing supply initiatives to gain a greater competitive advantage in today's business world.

Charles C. Poirier is a partner in the CSC National Supply Chain Practice, one of the world's largest information technology and management consulting firms. An industry veteran with over forty years of experience, he has held a variety of management positions, including senior vice president of manufacturing and marketing at a Fortune 100 company. He is also an adjunct professor at the Lake Forest Graduate School of Management and the author of Business Partnering for Continuous Improvement, Avoiding the Pitfalls of Total Quality, and Supply Chain Optimization.

Stephen E. Reiter is a Principal with A.T. Kearney Management Consulting Services in Chicago. In this capacity, he has assisted many worldwide corporations in achieving performance gains through the application of Total Quality Management, Process Reengineering, and Information Technology. He has twenty-three years of experience in Information Technology leadership, serving the market in such positions as VP and CIO for Tenneco's Packaging Corporation of America and Hillenbrand Industries, managing Systems Development, Communications, R&D, TQM, Purchasing, and Customer Service. His innovative use of IT in support of manufacturing gained him selection by CIO magazine as a Key Member of the Innovative 100. He is coauthor of Supply Chain Optimization.