Competing on the basis of your supply chain performance has become more important than ever in this tough economy. With revenues down and demand uncertain, where do you cut costs? If your company isn't the biggest in your market or the lowest cost provider or the first to introduce new products, what kind of results can you expect to achieve with supply chain improvements?

Four strategies can work for the rest of us:

1. Stop obsessing over Six Sigma
2. Forget about achieving the "perfect order"
3. Pay your suppliers better
4. Don't talk to customers

Stop Obsessing Over Six Sigma

Leading companies have come to realize that business process innovation and improvement -- not just new products or services -- can be major sources of competitive advantage. Companies that have adopted this mindset employ a more disciplined approach to process management. But it's important not to obsess over the myriad methodology choices out there and instead focus more on where you apply the methodology. Whatever your company has chosen to achieve and sustain operational excellence, the most important thing to do in today's economy is to leverage that chosen process lifecycle methodology to focus on customer-visible process improvements.

It's time to move beyond optimizing individual processes to the nth degree and emphasize improvements that drive through your extended supply chain to your customer's customer.

Identify those business processes that matter most -- and for manufacturers, distributors and retailers, surely the customer-facing supply chain processes would count among them, even if you do outsource some of them -- and then digitize those processes. Business Process Management (BPM) is the leading means for accomplishing this, as it ties together all aspects of a process both from a descriptive and execution perspective, and from a line of business and IT perspective.

Don't just digitize those customer-facing processes to improve how work moves through them, but consider capabilities that also improve how that work gets done. Improving process with speed alone can only help you make the same mistakes faster, and forcing an unfamiliar, non-intuitive user interface on staff can hurt productivity more than it helps. Whether your goals are to comply with complex business rules for customer disputes or to gain faster access to customer correspondence for a "single version of the truth," people are your organization's most important asset to meet those goals. Use tools that can make your extended supply chain process work for the people, not the other way around. Think of how much faster your new and improved process will be adopted, whatever methodology you've chosen, and how often it will be adhered to, if it actually helps your people get their work done.

Forget About Achieving the "Perfect Order"

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