Tailored toolkit to enable seamless supply chains

Despite many individual well-documented and high-profile business process re-engineering success stories, the achievement of such enhanced performance still tends to be the exception rather than the norm. What is missing from the equation is a robust, generic, methodology that will help practitioners to plan, execute and successfully re-engineer supply chains. The aim of the present paper is to assist in this process by providing a tailored toolkit to enable a seamless supply chain based on the concept of smooth material flow and associated information flow. This toolkit is tested in-depth via observations on 40 real-world value streams covering a range of market sectors. The applicability of each of the 12 rules forming the toolkit is then assessed and prioritized in relation to a range of operational factors including product marketing characteristics and product delivery processes. The consequence of the present research is the segmentation of the rules into those found to have universal applicability and those which are especially important in specific product-related scenarios. There is further partitioning into rules that are primarily of internal application and those requiring considerable external collaboration.