Project aims

This project, conducted by IfM ECS in 2012, involved a leading premium consumer goods company and the aim was to inspire breakthrough thinking regarding its approach to end-to-end supply chain strategy. The company already enjoyed a leading market position over its competitors, supported by a markedly different end-to-end supply chain approach. Despite this success, the senior management was concerned that the supply chain aspects that underpinned recent success were poorly understood. With the company now entering an aggressive global expansion phase, it was imperative that existing meta-capabilities were made explicit, and that these were purposefully enhanced as part of the future plan.

Nature of collaboration

The collaboration lasted 12 months and involved a senior cross-functional client team working closely with CIM and IfM ECS’s team of researchers and practitioners through a series of workshops and analysis steps. The project was structured around the toolkit of end-to-end configuration and capability as described above, culminating in a highly creative set of workshops to define existing and desired meta-capabilities. The final step of the project involved interactive presentation of the recommendations to the annual strategy review involving the company’s 25 most senior executives.

Results

The project results, illustrated below, have been adjusted and generalised to avoid disclosure of sensitive materials. The chart on the left is the result of the end-to-end capability assessment showing ‘gap’ versus ‘existing capability’. This shows the existing capability distribution across the four explanatory quadrants, and the clustering of items in and around the ‘mature strengths’ to help explain existing meta-capabilities. The existing meta-capabilities are described on the right-hand side in terms of how they have enabled the recent industry-leading performance. A similar output was developed for the desired meta-capabilities (not shown here), which was used to prioritise a set of strategic thrusts.

Benefits

This project challenged the company’s senior team to consider end-to-end supply chain development in a radically different way. This helped to develop a set of strategic action plans that went beyond incremental improvements to encompass fundamental changes in terms of: how they should approach innovation end-to- end; how they need to collaborate with network partners; how they must respond to disruptive changes in distribution channels; and how they need carefully to guide expansion of the globalising supply chain. The company has recently announced another year of record growth and profits.