Supply Chain Redesign: Transforming Supply Chains into Integrated Value Systems

Today's most competitive companies are going beyond "first-generation" supply chain management, to integrate processes, information flows, and material flows more thoroughly than ever before. Supply Chain Redesign brings together the field's latest advances, giving business professionals a complete framework for driving out costs, improving efficiency, and optimizing the business value of any supply chain.

Robert Handfield and Ernest Nichols offer practical insight and detailed guidance into every aspect of supply chain redesign—mapping existing supply chains, identifying changes that promise the best and fastest ROI, intelligently leveraging new technologies, strengthening relationships with key partners, and much more. From the world's most significant case studies to the latest emerging trends, this book is an unparalleled resource for supply chain success.

• Powerful new approaches to strategic cost management

Today's most systematic and most effective approaches to managing cost

• Building and strengthening key supplier relationships

Deepening the collaborative, trust-based supplier relationships that are critical to success

• New technologies, emerging standards

Leveraging the advantages of Web-based technologies-and minimizing the risks

• Deploying your strategy: the central role of leadership

What senior management must do to support your supply chain initiative

• "Supply chain friendly" product design

Designing products that support lean supply chains

• GM and Nortel: Making global supply chain redesign work

Comprehensive casestudies from two of the world's largest supply chain initiatives

The complete, hands-on guide to optimizing any supply chain.

• Emerging trends and key success factors
• Enhancing collaboration and trust throughout your redesigned supply chain
• Designing products that support efficient supply chains
• Supply chain 'sweet spots"—identifying changes with the greatest payoff
• Effective B2B e-commerce and Web-based strategies
• Nortel and GM: case studies in successful supply chain redesign

Supply chains exist for one reason: to create customer value. Radical changes in every aspect of business and technology have fostered the emergence of integrated "value chains" that maximize customer value by maximizing efficiency and integration. In this book, leading supply chain experts Robert Handfield and Ernest Nichols review the state-of-the-art in supply chain management, identify emerging trends that will lead to even greater change, and present powerful new strategies for redesigning any supply chain.

Handfield and Nichols show how to map existing supply chain networks, identifying and integrating information flows throughout an organization. Using real-world examples, they demonstrate how to enhance collaboration and trust throughout the supply chain; integrate customers and suppliers to design products that support efficient supply chains; and make the most of strategic cost management techniques. The book includes detailed chapters on B2B e-commerce, on creating information visibility on the Web, and on the key factors that lead to success in actual deployments.