Building Horizontal Connectors

Building the right horizontal connectors. How can the organization build strong horizontal processes to sense, translate, and shape demand while sensing and translating supply risk What is the best way to connect research and development (R D) launch plans to horizontal processes How do horizontal processes best support the business strategy Who should lead them Is there a need for a formal commercialization process and turnover ... 

If we are to build systems by assembling components, we need a set of standards that are agreed to by component developers so that these components can interoperate and reduce the development burden of common tasks. Many of these issues would need to be addressed even without components, but the need for standardization would be less. There are three broad categories of standards horizontal, vertical, and connectors (see Figure 10.4). 

In the evolution, the vertical silos of supply become connected through horizontal processes. The most common horizontal processes are revenue management, sales and operations planning (S OP), supplier development, and corporate social responsibility (CSR). (This transition is covered in great detail in Chapter 5.) These horizontal processes become connectors for the end-to-end value network. They align the traditional supply processes of source, make, and deliver against a business strategy. When companies successfully build market-driven value networks, demand and supply volatility can be traded off bidirectionally... 

---