Today, well-intended supply chain professionals are structurally encased in vertically focused functional silos.
In the design of the IT initiatives, many companies don’t spend enough time on metrics and reward systems. Continually they should ask themselves, “If we are successful, what does work look like? How do we reward the right behaviours? How does this change the current incentives?”
Few companies ask of “What should they stop doing? And, for success, what does the organization need to unlearn?” The unlearning process needs to be structured and focused on learning new ways of working.
Until we do this, IT can give us faster cars, but we still have to drive them on the same crowded roads.
The biggest barrier to a customer-centric strategy is organizational alignment.
As long as sales incentives are tied to volume, marketing is rewarded on market share, and operations on cost, companies will never achieve a customer-centric response.