Developing a Customer Driven Supply Chain

Agility Achieved

Altera, a leading supplier of programmable logic semiconductors, was facing an expanding portfolio of products, an increase in product complexity, lengthened manufacturing cycle time, and more demanding customer lead times. As a result of architecting and deploying a customer driven supply chain, Dornseif reports an increase in overall business efficiency, even in the face of demanding and increasingly complex market conditions.

The solution implemented at Altera is remarkably similar to one that Quality Deployment is currently recommending to one of our high tech clients; that is, to improve internal sales and operations planning (S&OP), and to increase collaboration with key customers and suppliers.
 

Here's an outline of a customer-driven supply chain developed by Quality Deployment:

A Customer-centric Approach

Once an organization has the capability to meet customers and suppliers where they are, to collect their information through the preferred channels and process that against internal constraints, the addition of Altera’s approach to segmenting customers, products and risk is brilliant.

Here’s why. Having the capability to get accurate information and meet customer requirements is not the same as delivering on it. There is internal and external work required to establish communication channels with customers and suppliers, to set up planning systems, to stratify and segment customers, products, inventory, and assets to achieve service levels, to capture supply chain, vendor, and manufacturing performance, and to optimize all of this information for cost and service. The segmentation of customers, products and risk provides the framework for prioritizing change.   

Central Business Value

Quality Deployment believes that central business value propositions like these are the key to successful and fruitful enterprise architectures. And, without IT and the business having a shared perspective on how and when, these results are hard, if not impossible, to achieve because change is required on both sides.

Our clients hire us because we know the business. If this resonates with you, perhaps we should speak.