Harvard Business ReviewAligning incentives in supply chains英文电子书.pdf

A supply chain stays tight only if every company on it has reasonsto pull in the same direction. byV.G. Naxayanan andAnanth Ramaxl Aligning a in Supply Chains all Street still remembers the day it heard that Ciscos much- vaunted supply chain had snapped. On a mad Monday, April 16, w2001,the worlds largest network-equipmentmaker shocked inves- tors when it warned them that it would soon scrap around $2.5bil- lion of surplusraw materials- one of the largest inventory write-offs in U.S. busi- ness history. The company reported in May a net loss of $2.69 billion for the quarter, and its shareprice tumbled by approximately 6%on the day it made that announcement. Ciscowas perhaps blindsided by the speedwith which the United States had advanced into recession, but how could this paragon of supply chain management have misread demandby $2.5billion, almosthalf asmuch as its sales in the quarter? Experts blamed the companys new forecastingsoftware,and ana- lysts accused seniorexecutivesof burying their heads in sockets,but those experts and analysts were mostly wrong. In truth, Cisco ended up with a mountain of subassemblyboards and semicon- ductors it didnt need because of the way its supplychainpartners had behaved in the previous 18months. Cisco doesnt have production facilities, soit passes orders to contract manufacturers. The contractors had stockpiled semifinishedproducts