Supply Chain Innovations: Five Big, Bold Trends

The supply chain initiatives of the past decade rewrote the book on supply chain management. But what might be the next decade’s supply chain management innovations? Accenture’s supply chain management experts identify five major trends driving the innovative thinking of tomorrow’s supply chain leaders.

Outside-The-Box Manufacturing

Competitiveness and customer service can improve greatly when business-process information is shared.

The Right Mix in Product Line Design Increases Profits for the Firm

Determining the right mix of products to offer in the marketplace has long been considered the purview of a firm’s marketing team. New research conducted by Olin Professor Panos Kouvelis reveals that operational implications of product line decisions are not to be overlooked.

“The era of unrestrained line extensions is over. Firms that align products and production-distribution systems with customer needs will create stronger margins … [ Read more ]

Share and Share Alike

Manufacturers are forcing suppliers to move online to exchange information more easily and make supply chains more efficient.

Supply On Demand

Vendors are ramping up their supply-chain software to give vital real-time information.

Business Processes: From Reengineering to Management

A brief history lesson on why “reengineering” was such a hit a decade ago- and
why it’s so last-millenium thinking now.

Nine Opportunities to Achieve Supply Chain Excellence in Asia

Depending on the country and the industry, supply chains in Asia lag three to five years behind the West in terms of creating efficiencies and improving effectiveness. Accenture’s Supply Chain Management experts identify nine specific opportunity areas to close the performance gap and create a competitive advantage.

Business Process Outsourcing Big Bang: Creating Value in an Expanding Universe

Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) once had a clear place in the executive’s toolkit-it was used to achieve cost savings in transaction-intensive, back office business processes. That’s all changed. BPO is emerging as a flexible and powerful approach that business leaders can use to achieve a wide range of tactical and strategic aims. A new piece of thought leadership, published in conjunction with Accenture’s Institute for … [ Read more ]

Two Major Errors That Companies Make In Outsourcing Services

When companies outsource back-office services overseas, one of the biggest challenges they face is measuring the results. Failure to monitor whether work is being performed correctly after it moves outside a company can result in massive and costly errors. How can companies protect themselves against such risks? Ravi Aron, co-director with Jitendra Singh of a recent Wharton executive education program on business-process outsourcing, offers some … [ Read more ]

e-Supply Chain Management: Managing The Extended Enterprise (.pdf)

Collaborative e-Supply Chain Management will necessitate critical changes in the philosophy, processes and communication systems of how trading partners will and must work together. Donovan provides an assessment checklist and also makes some observations about software and how to get started.

Six Sigma – The Structure of Management

A guide to the roles and responsibilities of Six Sigma. And guess what?
It all starts at the top.

The Power of Design for Six Sigma

In this short fictionalized business tale, Chowdhury effectively introduces the theory and practice of Design For Six Sigma (DFSS), a quality tool that extends Six Sigma thinking to the design of products and processes. It describes a five stage DFSS process – IDDOV: Identify and Define the opportunity, Develop the concept, Optimize the design, and Verify the optimized design.

A Portfolio Approach to SCM

Seamless collaboration with complete information sharing between all supply chain participants is still in the future. But there are strategies to deal with the current transitional state to help you come out on top today.

Managing Product Returns at Hewlett Packard

Product returns have existed since the first time anyone manufactured a product. In the ‘customer-is-always-right’ culture of the US, product returns are increasingly eating into profits, leading manufacturers to develop a returns strategy. In this new Case Study, Professors Van Wassenhove and Guide, and Neeraj Kumar look at the issue within HP’s inkjet product line.