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What are the 3 biggest challenges faced by supply chain/purchasing professionals today? (Survey Result 15)

Written by: Jon Hansen

Article Overview: There are many factors both internally as well as externally that are affecting supply chain/ procurement practices today. From the growing talent vacuum to the continuing lack of collaboration between Finance, IT and Purchasing relative to corporate initiatives. What in your own experiences and opionions are the top 3 issues that procurement professionals face?

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What are the 3 biggest challenges faced by supply chain/purchasing professionals today? (Survey Result 15)

Anurag, Change Manager, Turnarounds and Start-ups, Bombay, India

Honestly believe that you dont need to find 3. I would believe that single biggest metric is Scope. Its all about defining scope. SCM is such a wide meaning definition that it means so many different things to different people/organisations. I have seen organsiations where SCM is about building warehouses or deploying a fleet. and then some which talk about extended supply chain - partners etc. Most times, organsiations fall into a trap on sub-optimising their supply chains because of the scope they have defined for themselves - for reasons of organisation/ entity structure/geographic scope.

A large scale retailer in India current has a Logistics department which has an independent scope over that of a Merchandising department. And so while the latter keeps buying in CHina, the former has no visibiluity and keeps falling over in trying to arrange local services. The freight negotiations are done by a 3rd party. An isolated finance department has cash flow KPIs. Isnt this a scenario that most of us can identify with?

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Home > Small-Business-Consulting > Jon Hansen > What are the 3 biggest challenges faced by supply chainpurchasing professionals today Survey Result 15
Article Tags: bombay india, cash flow, china, entity structure, finance department, fleet, geographic scope, kpis, local services, logistics department, many different things, merchandising department, negotiations, scm, start ups, supply chain partners, supply chains, turnarounds, ups, warehouses



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