The LIVING Supply Chain
The LIVING Supply Chain: The Evolving Imperative of Operating in Real Time by Robert Handfield and Tom Linton is a guide to keeping up with the accelerating realities of supply chain.
LIVING, a clever acronym for Live, Intelligent, Velocity, Interactive, Networked, and Good, provides supply chain managers a guide to staying ahead of the curve with rapid digitization and technology changes, competing in the global economy, becoming more sustainable, and remaining responsive to customer needs.
Handfield points out that “The next competitive capability in the supply chain will be visibility with real-time response and digitization as ingredients for driving growth in a flat economy. Visibility requires transparency, which in turn can be leveraged through the new technological capabilities of inexpensive cloud-based computing, distributed computing “at the edge,” and the growth of a digital ecosystem.”
The companies that make the change? They’re the ones that will remain after the digital shift.
Customers are now demanding both visibility—transparency in company practices, supporting sustainability and good people policy—and velocity—moving their stuff to them fast as established by the Amazon trend.
Likewise, velocity and visibility are reflected in the values of supply chain managers who are looking to survive the digital shift. Handfield says “Velocity is the ability of an organization to drive working capital rapidly from suppliers through end customers. Visibility is the relative transparency of events, material, and flows to all key decision-makers in the extended supply chain.”
To learn more about how LIVING supply chain can get velocity and visibility, you can check out The LIVING Supply Chain or visit https://scm.ncsu.edu/blog/2016/11/30/exploring-the-era-of-global-transparency-in-the-living-supply-chain/
