How to collaborate internally with your supply chain – collaborate | metrics | decisions
How to collaborate internally with your supply chain
The way that we make decisions has to change when we implement supply chain management. Rather than each business function working toward their own isolated metrics, we need to align decisions around the metrics that really matter to our customers, and our shareholders. So the third step in implementing a supply chain agenda is to collaborate internally. Let’s look at some specific ways that you can stimulate better collaboration. You can bring team members from different functions together to work on cross-functional teams. For example, maybe you could assign a team of people to work with one of your large customers.
That team could include experts in logistics, purchasing, and operations, as well as customer service and information technology. These cross-functional teams don’t need to be permanent, nor do they need to be full-time. Instead, you might create a temporary team just to identify and implement process improvements. Another way to improve internal collaboration is to implement integrated planning processes. One of the best examples is sales and operations planning, or S&OP. The S&OP process forces people to come together and collaborate to create a single forecast that everyone in the organization is committed to.
Collaborative planning processes often lead to immediate savings, that can be measured in inventory reductions, service improvements, and faster response times. We all know the saying, what gets measured, gets done. So in order to ensure that teams are collaborating, you should come up with shared metrics, and track the performance on a balanced scorecard. When everyone knows they’ll be held accountable for the results, then it’s more likely they’ll engage in the process. Sometimes asking people to collaborate, isn’t enough. People might actually need to walk in the shoes of another function, in order to understand what it takes to collaborate effectively, and make good supply chain decisions. One way to make this happen is through job rotation, where people spend a short time working in a different role.
A longer term option is to ask or to require people to take cross-functional assignments as a part of their career development process. In fact, some companies build this requirement into their succession planning models, so that employees need to get cross-functional education and experience, in order to get promoted in any supply chain role. Getting the folks inside of your organization working together, through cross-functional planning and execution is an important part of making supply chain management work.