The LIVING Supply Chain: The Evolving Imperative of Operating in Real Time
Creates a managerial compass for entering into the LIVING (Live, Intelligent, Velocity, Interactive, Networked, and Good) era of supply chain management and defines the imperative for creating Velocity and Visibility as the focal point for exploiting new digital, mobile, and cloud-based technologies
Written by well-known researchers in the field, this book addresses the changes that have occurred and are still unfolding at various organizations that are involved in building real-time supply chains. The authors draw on their experiences with multiple companies, along with references to the natural evolution of ecosystems throughout to help identify the “new rules of supply chain management.” The LIVING principles associated with the rapid digitization and technology changes occurring in the global economy are discussed, along with the push to become more sustainable and responsive to customer needs. Utilizing the LIVING framework provides readers with a roadmap for transformation that explores the following questions: Live – Do you have a real-time (LIVE) view of your information?; Intelligent – Are you able to connect the essential leverage points in your network through cloud, mobile, and other mediums that provides a platform for analytics?; Velocity – Is your entire enterprise and network focused on moving assets faster than ever before in its history?; Interactive– Is there a common governance structure that defines how observations are translated into issues, monitored, validated, and translated into specific actions and responses?; Networked – Is your multi-enterprise supply chain networked in such a manner that a common and aligned view of business priorities and actions aligned with trusting relationships common to everyone?; and Good – Is your network seeking to create good by the application of transparency that can drive improved sustainability, integrity, human, and labor rights and expose fraud and counterfeit activities in your global supply chain?
In addition, this book:
- Features emerging trends that are shaping supply chain operations worldwide as well as impacting the global business landscape
- Covers a broad range of topics in real-time supply chains, fractal supply chains, and supply chain genome networks
- Offers comprehensive explanations behind major developments taking place in industry and references leading companies
- Presents the “new rules of supply chain management” that draw on those developed in the book The Serengeti Rules
- Uniquely presents the application of real-time data in addition to discussing practical and real-world challenges such as increased disruptions in supply chains, use of big data, and increased optimization using data
- Discusses traditional scholarly approaches along with the current phenomenon that are challenging many prescribed supply chain strategies
The LIVING Supply Chain: The Evolving Imperative of Operating in Real Time is an ideal reference for professionals and practitioners in supply management, logistics, computer science, analytics, statistics, operations research, and industrial engineering. This book can also be used as a supplement for MBA-level courses in supply chain management.
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 Real-Time Supply-Chains are Here! Plug in or Die., August 7, 2017 By
D. B. Merrifield (Boston, Ma.) – See all my reviews
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This review is from: The LIVING Supply Chain: The Evolving Imperative of Operating in Real Time (Hardcover)
As a career player and consultant within distribution channels, I encourage every executive within physical-product supply chains or whole-good channels to invest in this book. The text-book price may be off-putting, but it is worth it. At the very least, please read the free “look inside” or “free (kindle) download”.
This book isn’t a tedious text with deep detail on topics like EDI standards. It is entertainingly and provocatively unique. The two authors are synergistic. Handfield is a Supply Chain professor who contributes: historical trend metrics; global case studies; and metaphor/analogies. Linton is the Chief Supply Chain executive for Flextronics (now Flex Corp, the sketch-to-scale, supply-chain powerhouse behind many big name product companies that outsource their manufacturing). He offers open-kimono information about what Flex is doing at their state of the art lab: Flex Pulse. (Only Flex and Amazon – as best I know – are building “LIVING” supply chain capabilities. Flex focuses on inbound supply chains to (tiers of) manufactures whereas Amazon is building the first End-Customer back to the factories Value-Chain.) Inbound supply chains and outbound value-added channels for whole goods are at a huge tipping point thanks to: cloud computing, smart algorithms and smart mobile devices all powered by exponentially growing bandwidth. End-to-end (E2E) supply chains will all get digital software wrappers that will compel every player therein to plug in to survive. Read this book through multiple times. Write down your new questions and ideas. And, start living and experimenting into them immediately. You won’t regret it.  The Life or Death Question Is? Which Living Supply Chain Is Your Future?, November 5, 2017 By
This review is from: The LIVING Supply Chain: The Evolving Imperative of Operating in Real Time (Hardcover)
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It doesn’t take too much to see where the tealeaves’ futures are converging: digitization. The authors asked/How than can this digitization be exploited to drive competitive value? They concluded: the intelligence of things combined with velocity, interactivity, networking, and doing the right thing; would complete the emergence the of real-time supply chain needs. This supply chain ecosystem[The Living Supply Chain], would adjust and evolve in ways similar to the natural world, fulfilling the promise of incorporating data and real-time systems efficiently. The continual backdrop to this picture is globalization, the rising wave of Big Data analytics, cognitive supply chains and driven cycle time improvements; that, when balanced, would challenge chains driven by selfish natures.
The authors then use, as an example to convey the concepts they’re writing about, a company that hasn’t ever existed before: with over 200,000 employees and over 1000 customers in 18 different industries, and produces billion or more in at least 12 verticals: Healthcare, Automobile, Industrial Home appliances, Central Equipment, Energy, Networking, Communications, Server/Storage, Wearables, Connected Living, and Mobile. They are one of the biggest companies nobody has ever heard of!. Also, the authors are laying this out using/explain all the buzzwords: conflict materials, C-level function, Sketch-to-Scale, customer-facing flows, material-facing flows, ERP system, strategic sourcing, reverse auctions, tropic cascades, vampire data, white space and much, much more. The problem from my frame of reading is nature/human. in other words, environmental sustainability, economic justice, and a living democracy are inseperable from a true living supply chain. Real life self-organizes as a system of biological communities that scale upward like nested Russian dolls from the micros to the global. A holonic structure – a system of nested parts. The species, that then thrive over the long haul, are those that find their place in the whole. NOT those that build a system outside the whole of nature. Especially the way our current leadership is extracting and exterminating nature piece by piece, part by part – then, with equal hubris, replacing it. With robotic bees? You get the picture? The real living supply chain does not blindly treat money as the PRIMARY resource constraint. Water, air, fertile land, trees, and much, much more make true LIVING wealth. The money wealth paradigm is obsolete[except if your a corporate robot and/or machine]. Time for a Real paradigm shift; not based on debt supported by corporate robotic, computerized, machine orientated living supply chains. Real wealth is based upon a living Earth supported by a vibrant, unbroken, and evolving living supply chain that mankind nurtures and is an important part of. The life or death question is?  Takes everything you know about ecosystems and Darwinian principles and applies it to supply chain management., August 21, 2017 By
Kelly McCarthy Barner (Shrewsbury, MA United States) – See all my reviews
This review is from: The LIVING Supply Chain: The Evolving Imperative of Operating in Real Time (Hardcover)
The LIVING Supply Chain: The Evolving Imperative of Operating in Real Time by Rob Handfield and Tom Linton (Wiley, 2017) takes everything you know about ecosystems and Darwinian principles and applies it to supply chain management.
One of the most telling sections in the book is in the Preface where Handfield shares three major shifts affecting the digital economy (paraphrased here by me): To me, these points are significant because they are NOT followed by something along the lines of “… and here is what all this means for supply chain.” Like the authors, we need to stop thinking of the supply chain as somehow separate or downstream from economic/digital trends. The supply chain is a fully integrated piece of the ecosystem – or should be – and must be managed as such. Every time we feel compelled to translate trends, priorities, forces into a supply chain-centric version, we obscure their meaning and slow the movement of information. Predators do not wait for changes in their food supply to be translated to explained to them before reacting. They adapt, relocate, or die out. Supply chains and their managers need to act with the same level of urgency every day and in the face of every decision. A perfect example of ‘survival of the fittest’ as applied to supply chain are the “cons” of speed, which are described in the book as (loss of) quality and increased risk. Since risk exists regardless, once supply chain managers make a reasonable effort to mitigate and plan for it, they can focus on controlling quality so that speed can be preserved without the loss of influence and trust. The energy conveyed by the content and flow of the book is likely created by a combination of the authors’ enthusiasm for what is possible for supply chain leaders open to the opportunities of the digital era and the frequent use of examples from nature (wildebeest, the ‘grolar’ bear, and elephant seals to name a few). As is true of the food chain, studying the supply chain as a living ecosystem reveals that it is vibrant, unpredictable, sometimes violent, and favors the bold. The last of the book’s 8 chapters is dedicated to the future of supply chains. The authors finish by identifying and discussing 6 major trends that will play a role in supply chain evolution from this point. They include increased autonomy, the risk of hacking, chain of custody, and real-time visibility. |
Real-Time Supply-Chains are Here! Plug in or Die.,
This book isnât a tedious text with deep detail on topics like EDI standards. It is entertainingly and provocatively unique. The two authors are synergistic. Handfield is a Supply Chain professor who contributes: historical trend metrics; global case studies; and metaphor/analogies. Linton is the Chief Supply Chain executive for Flextronics (now Flex Corp, the sketch-to-scale, supply-chain powerhouse behind many big name product companies that outsource their manufacturing). He offers open-kimono information about what Flex is doing at their state of the art lab: Flex Pulse. (Only Flex and Amazon – as best I know – are building âLIVINGâ supply chain capabilities. Flex focuses on inbound supply chains to (tiers of) manufactures whereas Amazon is building the first End-Customer back to the factories Value-Chain.)
Inbound supply chains and outbound value-added channels for whole goods are at a huge tipping point thanks to: cloud computing, smart algorithms and smart mobile devices all powered by exponentially growing bandwidth. End-to-end (E2E) supply chains will all get digital software wrappers that will compel every player therein to plug in to survive. Read this book through multiple times. Write down your new questions and ideas. And, start living and experimenting into them immediately. You wonât regret it.
The Life or Death Question Is? Which Living Supply Chain Is Your Future?,
R. A. Barricklow(Scaramouche) (Las Vegas NV USA) –
The authors then use, as an example to convey the concepts they’re writing about, a company that hasn’t ever existed before: with over 200,000 employees and over 1000 customers in 18 different industries, and produces $1 billion or more in at least 12 verticals: Healthcare, Automobile, Industrial Home appliances, Central Equipment, Energy, Networking, Communications, Server/Storage, Wearables, Connected Living, and Mobile. They are one of the biggest companies nobody has ever heard of!. Also, the authors are laying this out using/explain all the buzzwords: conflict materials, C-level function, Sketch-to-Scale, customer-facing flows, material-facing flows, ERP system, strategic sourcing, reverse auctions, tropic cascades, vampire data, white space and much, much more.
The problem from my frame of reading is nature/human. in other words, environmental sustainability, economic justice, and a living democracy are inseperable from a true living supply chain. Real life self-organizes as a system of biological communities that scale upward like nested Russian dolls from the micros to the global. A holonic structure – a system of nested parts. The species, that then thrive over the long haul, are those that find their place in the whole. NOT those that build a system outside the whole of nature. Especially the way our current leadership is extracting and exterminating nature piece by piece, part by part – then, with equal hubris, replacing it. With robotic bees?
You get the picture?
The real living supply chain does not blindly treat money as the PRIMARY resource constraint.
Water, air, fertile land, trees, and much, much more make true LIVING wealth.
The money wealth paradigm is obsolete[except if your a corporate robot and/or machine].
Time for a Real paradigm shift; not based on debt supported by corporate robotic, computerized, machine orientated living supply chains. Real wealth is based upon a living Earth supported by a vibrant, unbroken, and evolving living supply chain that mankind nurtures and is an important part of.
The life or death question is?
Which living supply chain is your future?