Transforming Supply Chains

Chapter 3

‘Outside-in’ design for supply chains

Seeing the world through the eyes of your customers and other key stakeholders

Introduction

Supply chains first became a formal field of management study in the 1960s, with the publication of seminal articles on distribution management by Neuschel¹ and Stolle.² But the surrounding thinking developed relatively slowly for several decades after that pivotal turning point.

Given the growth in many markets around the world in the last two decades of the twentieth century, the main preoccupation of commercial enterprises seems to have been solely about fulfilling the sometimes rapid growth in demand at practically any cost, and finding a ‘one-size-fits-all’ design to do the job.

Unfortunately, ...