External Drivers

Transformation of supply chains can be driven by a company s internal problems or they can be externally driven. The type and extent of restructuring should be determined by the nature of these drivers. The relevant question to ask would be how one identifies the extemal/intemal forces driving changes, and the mapping between the drivers and the supply chain capabdities. 

Qiakravarty, Supply Chain Transformation, Springer Texts in Business and Economics, DOI 10.1007/978-3-642-41911-9 l, 

While Anna s Linens and Nokia were able to restructure their supply chains successfully, others have failed. What differentiates a company in this context is the set of capabilities it possesses or can develop. These capabilities can be broadly categorized as customer management, procurement, production, outsourcing, and fulfillment. Each of these capabilities can be thought of as a grouping of the restructuring options similar to those shown in Table 1.1. A partial list of options for each category is shown in Table 1.2. 

Internal/ external Ordering Outsource drivers process logistics Central distribution Add features center to products Value chain Demand splintering shaping 

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For cmlian puiposes the inertial concept is to compress and heat a small sphere of D-T fuel with an external driver such as laser light, x-rays produced by lasers, or high energy ion beams. The resulting hot and extremely dense plasma burns the D-T mixture rapid-... 

Land/atmospheric interfacial processes which impact climate and biological activity on earth are illustrated in Figure 3. Emissions of carbon dioxide, methane, nitrogen dioxide, and chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) have been linked to the transmission of solar radiation to the surface of the earth as well as to the transmission of terrestrial radiation to space. Should solar radiation be an internal process or an external driver of the hydrologic cycle, weather, and air surface temperatures Compounds of sulfur and nitrogen are associated with acidic precipitation and damage to vegetation, aquatic life, and physical structures. 

Nevertheless, the response of water resources will be more complex, as human activities will also change in response to altered climates. The intensity of the pressure put on water resources and aquatic ecosystems by external drivers is related to higher economic income (e.g. expressed by electricity production and consumption) of human societies [5]. The limitation of resources can be qualified by a diversity of terms, varying somewhat in intensity drought, temporality, and... 

For industry the above table illustrates that some of the internal and external drivers are interlinked and that the biggest challenge lies in the uncertainty of workload in the geo-engineering market place. 

External Drivers Client Requirements Company capability Stakeholders Global factors Clients build relationships witli employees who have specialisms. Expectations from clients that employees will be available. Many companies operate in specialised areas that need specific graduates. Shareholders and/ or being part of a larger group can dictate areas of operation and hence types of employee needed. New factors such as sustainability have to be accommodated in short space of time. 

One external driver toward change is the June 2004 report of the President s Commission on Implementation of United States Space Exploration Policy, which recommended that NASA s centers should explore the possibility of becoming Federally Funded Research and Development Centers (Aldrich Commission, 2004). FFRDCs are not-for-profit organizations that operate under contracts with government agencies. 

Another external driver for change has been the CAIB report. NASA formed the so-called Diaz Team to look at issues stemming from the CAB report that were applicable to broad spectra of activities (Diaz Team, 2004), and this team made numerous recommendations. As well, CAB called for creation of an independent technical authority (CAB, 2003) to raise the importance of safety. NASA had already created the NASA Engineering and Safety Center (NESC) in response to the Columbia disaster. However, NESC does not have as much independence as CAB urged, so NASA is creating another administrative subsystem to fulfill this need, with the result that NESC appears to add redundant complexity. NESC has achieved some successes that may warrant its preservation, but NASA needs to clarify the distinctive responsibilities of NESC, the office of the Chief Safety and Mission Assurance Officer, the engineering organizations, and the independent technical authority advocated by CAB. 

A model, called Forest Fire after its originator, Charles Forest has been developed for describing the decomposition rates as a function of the experimentally measured distance of run to detonation vs. shock pressure (the Pop plot named after its originator, A. Popolato ) and the reactive and nonreactive Hugoniots. The model can be used to describe the decomposition from shocks formed either by external drivers or by internal pressure gradients formed by the propagation of a burning front. 

The major external drivers, mentioned earlier, include customer-preferences, technology, emerging economies, dismptions, and environmental sustainability, as shown in Fig. 1.1. 

Technology can be a powerful external driver. Much has been written about how the internet transformed the supply chain. It transformed from being linear as shown in Fig. 1.2, where information could only be accessed sequentially between functions, to a nonlinear system shown in Fig. 1.3, where any function could access information from any other. 

The impact of the external drivers on the contemporary supply chain is discussed in depth in Chaps. 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6. The evolution of supply chains driven by emerging paradigms such as humanitarian relief, emerging economies, sustainability, and healthcare delivery are elaborated in Chaps. 7, 8, 9 and 10. 

It follows that the company needs to build a set of logistics capabilities to respond to the external and internal drivers, discussed above. As shown in Fig. 5.3, the four first tier capabilities are warehousing, transportation, packaging, and managing customers. The cluster of capabilities, labeled managing customers refers to external drivers, whereas the other three clusters labeled warehousing , transportation , and packaging , are related to the internal drivers. 

The external drivers of a relief chain are markedly different from those of a commercial supply chain, as they are primarily defined by social values. The... 

Next in Fig. 8.6, we illustrate the capabilities that the humanitarian relief chain should possess, using the framework developed in Chap. 1. Note that the cluster of capabilities, labeled as demand management refers to external drivers, whereas the other three clusters labeled as fund management , logistics , and collaboration relate to internal drivers. 

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