Engineering the Seamless Supply Chain

Successful re‐engineering programs to improve supply chain performance possess three important attributes: a vision which clearly identifies future goals; a framework with clearly defined stages forming a route map; and, a toolkit which provides a means for enhancing the individual processes within the chain. In this paper the vision is the seamless. supply chain, and we outline an appropriate established framework, and supporting toolkit. The core of our approach is smooth material flow enabled by a proven set of simplicity rules. This ensures total integration of vision, framework, and toolkit. A case study illustrates the application of the methodology showing the bottom‐line performance improvement resulting from a supply chain process re‐engineering program.