Supply chain for major projects

It is also evident that there is now increasing awareness amongst both practitioners (WWW. viasysweb.com) and academics (O Brien, 2001) of applying 

The Airbus A380 is a double-deck four-engined airhner manufactured by Airbus SAS. It first flew on 27 April 2005 from Toulouse in France. After well-publicized lengthy delays commercial flights are not likely before 2008. 

In this chapter, we cover the challenges and opportunities of improving the performance of supply chain in major projects under the following headings  

Sharing information in projects Collaborative forecasting and scheduling in projects Procurement in projects Community networking in projects Operational excellence in projects 

Project definition Project organisation Project implementatioiy Project closure  

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The project group designed a questionnaire with 286 questions, structured to cover each substep of all the types of major steps encountered in the supply chains. If an enterprise covered more than one major step, this meant that more than one interview was carried out, with more than one person or more interviews with the same person. For each enterprise, the interviewees typically answered 150-200 questions about 1-3 major steps. The questions were designed by experts to describe the principles and intentions of the... 

The need to consider the supply chain adds another dimension to the CE concept. Now it is not just tooling and material that must be considered, but also the distribution channels, inventory policy, and other supply chain issues. CE for the entire supply chain particularly fits in the case of B, C, and E products in the development funnel. In these cases, a new product is more likely to be accompanied by a new supply chain. These are likely to be major projects involving a great number of unknowns about the market and the likelihood of commercial success. 

The initiative for supply chain improvement will come from a sponsor s firm. The sponsor is an executive who champions the effort. The sponsor s firm can be a dominant player in the supply chain or one with a major stake in the project s success. The sponsor should have completed the preparation steps described previously in this section and will likely be somewhere in the process of developing and implementing its supply chain strategy. Indeed, the sponsor s firm may have already completed internal restructuring tasks. 

Customers are one of the major values for any company. Hence, the basic objectives of supply chain management include the improvement of both external and internal customer service. To maintain and develop their relationships with purchasers, companies use different strategies. Some of them attempt to establish partnership relationships and trust, and to complete projects together with purchasers, while others set up exit barriers for customers or entrance barriers for competitors (Swiatowiec 2006, p. 139). 

As indicated earlier, a project supply chain becomes more complex for a major project (such as Airbus 380 or London Olympic 2012) where the project lasts for several years, with many stakeholders, and a multilayer of contractors and subcontractors. Figure 16.2 shows a conceptual model of a project supply chain in a major construction project. Several subcontractors work on such a project. Each contractor is served by several subcontractors and each subcontractor is served by several supphers. Suppliers in turn can be served by one or more sub-suppliers and so on. We therefore argue that in a major project there a case for deploying a supply chain management discipline (such as risk management) during the total hfe cycle of the project. 

As we discussed in Chapter 13, web-enabled technologies have now progressed to create e-supply chains. The market for managing the core ERP information (orders, inventory, etc.) of the extended supply chain is only now beginning to emerge in major projects as the following case example illustrates. 

In all of these projects, the supply chains are planned and controlled by the SCM management of those firms in the manner we learned in Chapter III for a single enterprise. The supply chains have now simply expanded to include the major partner activities. 

Businesses often launch supply chain restructuring projects that typically do not incorporate the implications of government taxes. But this can mean that the effective costs increase and opportunities are missed, after a restructuring. Taxes have major implications for almost aU supply chain activities including business development, R D, product design, procurement, manufacturing, distribution, logistics, and services (Chakravarty 2005). 

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