Supply Chain Management: The Great Equalizer

Supply Chain Management: The Great Equalizer

In the supply chain, all things are never equal. Success and failure hinge on your capacity to adapt and respond to change. It’s a matter of creating innovative products, developing a means to deliver them to market, and jockeying for competitive position—in effect, matching supply to demand in the most efficient and economical way possible.

Mastering these variables, and striking the right balance, can be the ultimate competitive differentiator. But it’s difficult.

Why? Because variability is a constant. Visibility is obscured. Regardless of how good your product is, you are continually challenged with flexing capacity, labor, and inventory at different touchpoints along the value chain to mitigate myriad forces that threaten to tip the balance one way or the other.


When supply chain management is your enterprise’s business philosophy, you get visibility, collaboration, velocity, and demand responsiveness. You not only flatten variances, you multiply your supply chain force.

The following six case studies demonstrate how companies large and small, domestic and global, practitioners and pioneers, are leveraging transportation and logistics best practices to act as great equalizers and force multipliers.

Whether it’s trending toward demand-driven logistics principles, partnering with 3PLs to align and streamline transportation and distribution processes, tapping new technologies, investing in materials handling solutions, empowering your workforce, or optimizing DC site locations, mixing and matching tactics and strategy will improve performance and squeeze out costs.

All things being never equal, supply chain management can be a force multiplier. But in a world defined and dictated by change, it is always the greatest equalizer. Using demand-driven logistics practices to create a responsive supply chain is the best competitive weapon your company can have.

Read this series of articles to find out why.

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