Start Pulling Your Chain!

Because of the Internet, with its continuing technological advances supported by ongoing multitrillion-dollar investments in global communications and transportation infrastructure, the cadence of business is now shifting from an anticipatory (push) to a responsive (pull) posture. Growing customer connectivity requires rethinking the way a business operates and the way its customers and suppliers are engaged. Most businesses will need to be operationally reinvented if they are to survive. This transformation calls out the need for responsive supply chain operations to achieve unprecedented levels of consumer satisfaction enabled by equally unprecedented levels of end-to-end supply channel performance.

Start Pulling Your Chain (SPYC) examines how and why we operate supply chains within businesses today and the paradigm shift needed to compete in the disruptive Information Age going forward. It highlights all a change like this will bring to customers, a company, and a firm s entire supply chain.

SPYC discusses what a responsive supply chain business model might look like and how it might perform within a company and between supply chain partners. It offers solutions on how to think and lead change with a responsive supply chain business model using twenty-first-century realtime responsiveness supported by the broad use of information networks.

SPYC provides insight on how to create and sustain legendary relationships with customers and suppliers. It presents points of view on what leadership models are needed to operate in the twenty-first-century global real-time world.

SPYC provides recommended initial steps to start transforming your supply chain into a responsive model capable of sustaining unprecedented levels of customer satisfaction and profitable growth in the future.

Don Bowersox and Nick LaHowchic collaborate to discuss the unparallel opportunity twentyfirst-century information technology is providing for the design and implementation of responsive supply chain operations. Through collaborative academic and practitioner experience, they discuss how real-time information and growing customer connectivity require reinventing business and customer engagement.