Book Review
Supply Chain Management Process Standards
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Author:
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Supply Chain Visions
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Publisher:
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Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals |
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ISBN:
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978-0-9825348-1-6
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Pages:
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151-page ring-bound paperback
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The second edition of the Supply Chain Management Process Standards utilises the American Productivity & Quality Centre (APQC) Process Classification Framework (PCF) to present the minimum and best practice attributes. The PCF serves as a highlevel, industry-neutral enterprise process model that allows organisations to see their business processes from a cross-industry viewpoint.
This cross-industry framework has experienced more than 15 years of use by thousands of organisations worldwide, enabling companies to perform beneficial benchmarking. The PCF was developed by APQC and its member companies as an open standard to facilitate improvement through process management and benchmarking, regardless of industry, size or geography. The PCF organises operating and management processes into 12 enterprise level categories, including process groups and over 1 000 processes and associated activities.
The Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals (CSCMP) published the first set of process standards in 2004. The standards were meant to be used as a tool to help companies identify potential gaps in the processes while practitioners could use this to identify process strengths and weaknesses to enable them to focus attention where improvement effort would drive most benefit. These standards were published in six booklets with each covering one of the plan, source, make, deliver, return and enable processes. The CSCMP adopted the Supply-Chain Council’s SCOR Level 1 Framework as the general framework for the first standards. This framework has been used by many companies to formalise standards for their supply chains and I also found these first standardshighly useful. It was a wise decision at the time to base the CSCMP process standards on the SCOR framework.
The CSCMP decided to use a different framework for the second edition of the standards reference book. This time, the framework used is not SCOR, but the open standard PCF. This is a totally different framework and in fact, one could argue that this publication should not carry the same title with ‘second edition’, but rather be a ‘first edition’ of a totally new and different publication. The second edition of the supply chain management process standards is published as one reference book and not multiple booklets. Previously, each booklet covered the respective process with a glossary that filled at least half of the book. This implied much overlap and a waste to have six separate books each with a similar glossary. The decision to have the second edition in one book with one extensive glossary makes sense as it handles much better and has all the standards together for reference purposes.
The application of the standards and the use of the tool in rating and assessing the performance of the companies under consideration remain the same aswith the first edition.
Differences exist between the SCOR and PCF framework categories and it is difficult to compare the two frameworks unless one has become accustomedto the PCF framework to find your way around. For example, the logistics elements of purchasing, transport and warehousing that are covered under the ‘Source’ and ‘Deliver’ processes in the SCOR framework are included under ‘Deliver Products and Service’ in the PCF framework. This new framework does have interesting new categories such as ‘Develop Vision and Strategy’ and ‘Manage Customer Service’ but it will take time totest the practicality for process standards.
My first reaction and observation is that supply chain management processes are better defined by the SCOR framework because supply chain management has so much in common with operations management.
I do not understand why Supply Chain Visions, the consultants who developed and published this second edition, decided to change from SCOR to PCF and it would have been helpful if they discussed that in the introduction of the reference book.
On closer reading though, it does seem that the authors had ‘method in their madness’ as the PCF framework serves as a high-level, industry-neutral enterprise process model that allows organisations to see their business processes from a cross-industry viewpoint. This cross-industry framework has been in use for more than 15 years by many organisations and it is maintained by APQC as an open standard to facilitate improvement through process management and benchmarking, regardless of industry, size or geography.
It is interesting to note that the SCOR framework allows for about 220 activities to be measured, while the new PCF framework includes about 170 activities. This implies that the new edition has been cleaned out and intentionally focused on those attributes related to supply chain management functions.
The challenge remains that many companies who implemented process standard management based on the SCOR framework, will have to unplug the previous and re-implement the new process standards.A more pragmatic approach could probably have been to update and improve the SCOR framework with what was seen to be better in the PCF framework. Apparently the differences were too large to support such a transformation and the new framework is recommended.
In conclusion, the second edition does add value and brings a totally new and different perspective to process standard management. The framework is strongly based on general management, which is probably where supply chain management is migrating, rather than in the technical space of operations management. It could be difficult to convert from the SCOR to the PCF framework once you have implemented SCOR but let us hope we shall soon see some qualitative assessment being done to compare the different frameworks and give some guidance as to the best framework to use.
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