Insights
Short, practical pieces for CEOs, boards and operations leaders — drawn from Gray’s two forthcoming books and four decades of running supply chains.
Featured · The Model
Full article coming soon.
The most common — and most expensive — error a leadership team can make is to treat customer satisfaction and financial results sequentially: deliver the number first and attend to the customer later, or delight the customer first and worry about the cost structure after.
Both errors assume the two outcomes can be optimized one at a time. They can’t. The market rewards predictability and responsiveness with share, and share takes one to three quarters to show up in margin and cash. Financial discipline, in turn, funds the customer experience the strategy requires.
Starve the customer to flatter this quarter’s number, and you’re borrowing from a future quarter that will collect interest.
The integrated plan exists on paper, while every function keeps running on its own numbers. The fix is one set of numbers that every decision references — a cultural discipline as much as a process one.
From The Supply Chain Operations Management Model · Full article coming soonA useful system that goes unused contributes zero. The cause is almost always distrust of the data, unclear decision rights, or meetings that never changed around the system.
From The Supply Chain Operations Management Model · Full article coming soonA rolling reforecast inside the S&OP cycle, plus weekly variance reviews, gives the team time to recover a developing miss while recovery is still possible.
From The Supply Chain Operations Management Model · Full article coming soonReactive, rule-based, integrated, predictive. The climb takes years — and knowing your stage is the first step in choosing the right next investment.
From The Supply Chain Operations Management Model · Full article coming soonA company can be profitable and still starve for cash. The cash-to-cash cycle is where operations answers the Treasurer’s question.
From The Supply Chain Operations Management Model · Full article coming soonThe meeting exists to make decisions, not to discover them. If yours runs long, the four steps before it aren’t doing their job.
From The Supply Chain Operations Management Model · Full article coming soonA leader who owns only the local activity becomes a dispatcher. A leader who understands the enterprise pattern becomes an integrator — and that is the leader the supply chain needs now.
From The COO/Supply Chain Operations Leadership Playbook · Full article coming soonEvery promise has a cost. Every buffer consumes cash. Operating choices matter to the board only once you can show how they convert into profit and cash.
From The COO/Supply Chain Operations Leadership Playbook · Full article coming soonA monthly review, a dashboard or a supplier call is useful only if it changes decisions. Here is how to tell whether yours does.
From The COO/Supply Chain Operations Leadership Playbook · Full article coming soon