Supply chain drivers

Supply chain drivers represent the critical areas of decision making in SCE, those that ultimately generate the outcomes that impact the supply chain performance. Thus, they appear as the decision/design variables in the optimization models used in SCE decision making. The key drivers of supply chain performance are described next, and the chapters at follow are organized along the key drivers of supply chain performance. 

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When asked, "How many supply chains does the team have " often the supply chain group knows the answer intuitively. They look beyond items or assets. They think in terms of supply chain drivers and variability. It is a discussion of rhythms and cycles. The challenge is to have the entire organization think holistically and be inclusive of all supply chains when developing a design. Some examples are ... 

Understand the impact of business complexity on cost and supply chain drivers. Implement cross-functional processes to evaluate product and customer complexity. 

After the vision statement, company should start brainstorming what are the key supply chain drivers that need to be developed and achieved, in order to generate the expected business results. 

Give two examples of supply chain enablers. How do they differ from supply chain drivers ... 

In Chapter 1, we discussed how growing the supply chain surplus is the ultimate goal of a supply chain. Our premise was that increasing the surplus allows for a growth of supply chain profitability, which facilitates an improvement in the financial performance of each member of the supply chain. In this section, we define important financial measures that are reported by a firm and affected by supply chain performance. In later sections, we link supply chain drivers and associated metrics to the various financial measures. The definitions of financial measures in this section are taken from Dyckman, Magee, and Pfeiffer (2011). To illustrate the various financial measures, we use the financial results reported in 2013 by Amazon.com and Nordstrom Inc. and assume a tax rate of 0.35. 

On which supply chain drivers should a firm trying to shrink... 

Would you expect a brick-and-mortar retailer or an online retailer to have a higher asset turnover Which supply chain drivers impact asset turnover ... 

Changing the distribution network design affects the following supply chain costs (notice that these are four of the six supply chain drivers we discussed earlier) ... 

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