Power,valueandsupplychainmanagement.pdfVIP

Power, value and supply chain management Andrew Cox The current orthodoxy in supply chain thinking What is the current orthodoxy in supply chain management thinking? In very general terms it can be described as (Cox, 1997a):. . . a way of thinking that is devoted to discovering tools and techniques that provide for increased operational effectiveness and efficiency throughout the delivery channels that must be created internally and externally to support and supply existing corporate product and service offerings to customers. This way of thinking has its lineage in the work that was originally undertaken to un- derstand the phenomenal success of Japanese industry in the 1970s and 1980s, primarily in the automotive sector (Womack et al., 1990). Indeed, it can be argued that a great deal of supply chain management practice today appears to be nothing more than an attempt to replicate, in a variety of product and service supply chains, the approach to external resource management originally pioneered by Toyota. This approach (often referred to as `? lean thinking) is based on attempts to replicate Toyotas waste minimisation tech- niques (Womack and Jones, 1996). I will return to this way of thinking later because there are problems with it (Cox, 1997a), but it is worth stressing that the lean approach is very much the dominant para- digm in most writing about supply chains. Given this, it is perhaps worth outlining in summary form what the lean paradigm is. There appear to be eight defining character- istics of the lean approach: (1) Strive for perfection in delivering value to customers. (2) Only produce what is pulled from the customer just-in-time and concentrate only on those actions that create value flow. (3) Focus on the elimination of waste in all operational processes, internally and ex- ternally, that arise from overproduction, waiting, transportation, inappropriate processing, defects and unnecessary in- ventory and motion. (4) Recognise that all participan