Supply Chain Management – A Decade Later

In 1996, I joined 70 other companies in the formation of what was to become the Supply-Chain Council, Inc. (SCC) www.supply-chain.org. I was working at Lockheed Martin and we were trying to answer the question: What is supply chain management? In a very short time, we had added three important questions: how do we measure ourselves against our competition and world-class organizations in other industries and regions, how do we identify and adopt best practice, and what information technology should we be adopting?

After a year of consensus-building by practitioner companies (hosted by PRTM and AMR Research), the Supply-Chain Council formally attempted to answer the question with the release of the Supply Chain Operations Reference Model (SCOR) - Version 1.0. For almost the next decade I had the privilege of leading the Council's technical efforts – the body responsible for developing and publishing the SCOR Model (and ultimately the Design Chain Operations and Customer Chain Operations Reference Models – DCOR and CCOR). During my tenure at the SCC, the position of the Chief Technology Officer was a staff position. Because practitioner members could rely on the technical efforts of the Council to be neutral regarding approach and technology and independent of profit-motive, I was fortunate to get unprecedented access to the challenges and initiatives of companies around the world. The workshops I conducted with over 3000 senior leaders were interactive two to three day sessions where I learned as much as I tried to share.

Over the last few years, I have been asked to share some of the lessons learned along the way. There are a lot of people who have far more technical expertise that I have. What I hope to share in this weblog are the anecdotes, observations, and unique experiences that have shaped my understanding in the hope it may prove useful.