Uncovering Partnership Opportunities

All of this requires an understanding of what core competencies are required to remain competitive in the future. Our forecast is that SCM will, in many companies, be seen as a required core competency on a par with product technology competencies. Examples where it already is include widely acknowledged models,Wal-Mart and Dell. What form does a competency in SCM take Prahalad and Hamel, who identified competencies as a source of competitive advantage, point to three criteria for a core competency  

These criteria closely match Acme s objectives in developing its activity system in Chapter 10. Acme wanted to tailor its delivery system to the needs of multiple segments. Acme designed its systems around customer requirements after surveying these requirements as described in Chapter 11. Finally, Acme sought a system of linked activities, not just individual activities that would be difficult to imitate. 

The remainder of this chapter describes how to make the transition from activity system design to a strategy for adding partners in the supply chain. 

We can illustrate how a partnership strategy could possibly evolve from an activity system, again turning to Acme as our example. Acme s strategy called for a restructuring of its supply chain along the lines of a newly developed activity system. These activities fit together to form a supply chain to better serve its customers. 

The decision to take on a partner depends on Acme s own evaluation of its needs. However, as Table 20.1 shows, there are many options for expanding the use of partnerships in Acme s case. 

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The competition today is no longer between individual firms but between supply chains. To survive and thrive in the competition, firms have strived to achieve greater supply chain collaboration to leverage the resources and knowledge of suppliers and customers. Internet-based technologies, particularly interorganiza-tional systems (lOS), further extend the firms opportunities to strengthen their supply chain partnerships and share real-time information to optimize their operations. The objective of this book is to uncover the nature and characteristics, antecedents, and consequences of supply chain collaboration Ifom multiple theoretical perspectives. 

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