Just four simple words
By Mitch Mac Donald -- Modern Materials Handling, 1/1/2000
Four years isn't really a long time in the overall scheme of things. Given the pace of today's business, though, it can at times seem like an eternity.Consider, though, that just 48 months ago, less than a third of us had ever browsed the World Wide Web. Furthermore, only one in four business professionals claimed to be familiar with the term "supply chain management," and less than half of those thought that, if pressed for an answer, they could describe the concept in any detail.
It was also just four years ago that we began development of a new publication here at Cahners Business Information that looked to tap into the emerging supply chain trend. Problem was, even internally, we had difficulty explaining the concept simply.
Then, just a day or two before our final presentation to the CEO-the one that would decide whether or not our new idea would ever see the light of day-it came to us. The supply chain concept really isn't all that complicated at all. To be sure, the details and complexities of implementing a supply chain integration program, and harnessing all the appropriate support technology, is a huge task. The purpose and goals of supply chain management though, are really quite simple.
To help the CEO at the time understand what the supply chain was all about, we broke it down into four basic components; Plan, Source, Make, and Move. Those four words, we told him, describe the supply chain in a nutshell.
The explanation helped the cause, and just a few months later, we hit the street with a new quarterly, paid circulation business journal called Supply Chain Management Review. Today, SCMR thrives. After fours years as a quarterly, we now plan to increase its frequency to every-other-month starting in March.
As the magazine has grown, and as the interest in the supply chain topic has increased exponentially, the tendency, even four years later, still seems to be to overly complicate the concept. The supply chain today is covered in voluminous fashion by most every magazine that touches the manufacturing, warehousing, and distribution markets. And that includes MMH. (Note the description of the magazine right below the title on the cover.)
Amidst all the coverage and mountains of information on supply chain that comes at us from a variety of sources on an almost daily basis, I still find it important to step back once in a while and remember the four words that summed up the concept four years ago. Plan, Source, Make Move. Anything that has to do with any of those functions as a raw material travels through the pipeline on it's way to being a finished good in the end users hand, is part of the supply chain. The goal is to integrate all those activities into a singular focus on the ultimate customer.
The details behind the concept can indeed be mind-boggling. The concept itself, though, need not be. It all boils down to four simple words.
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