Build Better Supply Chain Relationships with New Oliver Wight White Paper

Gloucester, United Kingdom, October 12, 2012 --(PR.com)-- Business improvement specialists, Oliver Wight, have released a new Supply Chain Design and Optimization white paper. It provides essential advice on how to improve relationships with strategic supply chain partners and collaborate to deliver best-in-class service at half the cost.

With continuing economic uncertainty and growing global competition, successfully meeting customer demand has never been more important or challenging. The new Oliver Wight white paper, entitled ‘Supply Chain Design and Optimization: Building relationships throughout the extended supply chain’, explains how organisations can do this by improving relationships not just with direct customers and suppliers, but end-to-end.

“It is typical for companies to focus on those nodes in the supply chain that are closest to home,” says Stewart Kelly, Managing Partner at Oliver Wight and author of the paper. “But often when there are issues in the supply chain they are caused by multiple nodes or stem from those further upstream or downstream.”

The white paper champions supply chain collaboration, whilst positioning it as a journey of maturity. “Businesses must establish internal control and efficiency before they can think about supply chain design and connecting with customers and suppliers. Once they have done that, improved communication and integration ultimately mean the supply chain can work more closely to the demand signal, providing the opportunity to become more efficient, lean and agile.”

The culture needed to elicit lasting change is also described: “66% of change initiatives fail due to lack of leadership. In order to prevent this happening, active engagement and visible leadership is needed to motivate people across fiscal boundaries and within different companies,” Kelly concludes.