Business improvement specialists, Oliver Wight, have released a new Supply Chain Design and Optimization white paper. It provides essential advice on how to improve relationships with strategic supply chain partners and collaborate to deliver best-in-class service at half the cost.

With continuing economic uncertainty and growing global competition, successfully meeting customer demand has never been more important or challenging. The new Oliver Wight white paper, entitled ‘Supply Chain Design and Optimization: Building relationships throughout the extended supply chain’, explains how organisations can do this by improving relationships not just with direct customers and suppliers, but end-to-end.

“It is typical for companies to focus on those nodes in the supply chain that are closest to home,” says Stewart Kelly, Managing Partner at Oliver Wight and author of the paper. “But often when there are issues in the supply chain they are caused by multiple nodes or stem from those further upstream or downstream.”

The white paper champions supply chain collaboration, whilst positioning it as a journey of maturity. “Businesses must establish internal control and efficiency before they can think about supply chain design and connecting with customers and suppliers. Once they have done that, improved communication and integration ultimately mean the supply chain can work more closely to the demand signal, providing the opportunity to become more efficient, lean and agile.”

The culture needed to elicit lasting change is also described: “66% of change initiatives fail due to lack of leadership. In order to prevent this happening, active engagement and visible leadership is needed to motivate people across fiscal boundaries and within different companies,” Kelly concludes.

About Oliver Wight

Oliver Wight has a 40 year track record of delivering business improvement to some of the world’s best-known organisations. With a team of professionals offering a wealth of experience, Oliver Wight is the largest consultancy of its type, with offices throughout Europe, South Africa, North and South America, and the Asia Pacific region. We believe that sustainable business improvement can’t be delivered by external consultants but only by our clients’ own people, so unlike other consultancy firms, we transfer our knowledge to them, helping deliver performance levels and financial results that last.

Integrated Business Planning
At the leading edge of management thinking and practice, our Integrated Business Planning (IBP) model lies at the heart of our clients’ journey to outstanding business performance. Oliver Wight are the originators of sales and operations planning (S&OP) and IBP can most simply be described as advanced S&OP. However, unlike S&OP, IBP brings a truly strategic perspective, integrating diverse processes - in the extended supply chain, product and customer portfolios, customer demand and strategic planning - into one seamless management process.

Supply Chain Design and Optimization
Oliver Wight supply chain design and optimization allows organisations to understand their position within the extended supply chain; identify where value is being created and destroyed; develop profitable relationships with suppliers customers and consumers; and optimize their supply chain (however complex) for the ultimate in customer service and business performance.

Performance Benchmarking for Supply Chain
Oliver Wight Performance Benchmarking provides a qualitative and quantitative assessment of supply chain performance, allowing organisations to identify opportunities for improving customer service at the same time as dramatically reducing supply chain costs.

Meeting the Class A Standard
The Oliver Wight Class A Checklist is the longest standing and most successful business assessment tool. The latest, Sixth Edition, raises the bar, and sets ever more demanding standards for companies on their journey to business excellence and the Oliver Wight Class A standard.

Carol Collins (General Manager)
Oliver Wight EAME

The Willows
The Steadings Business Centre
Maisemore
Gloucester, UK
GL2 8EY

+44 (0) 1452 397200
carol.collins@oliverwight-eame.com
www.oliverwight-eame.com

This release was published on openPR.