| Supply Chain Management involves the processes of managing the course of operations that span your suppliers' supplier to your customer's customer. It involved the process of planning, communicating, executing and measuring the operations that involve the movement and transformation of goods involved in the transformation of raw materials into consumable products. One of the most well-known models for defining supply chain management comes from the Supply Chain Council, which has proffered the SCOR Model as a way of defining the realm of supply chain. Broadly stated, the SCOR Model breaks supply chain management into Plan, Source, Make, Deliver and Returns. However, as brilliant and insightful as the SCOR Model is, there is always room for criticism, and here is one that I'm hearing more of on an increasing basis: Why does the SCOR Model not include Product Lifecycle Management as part of its scope? For starters, there is now a significant movement afoot for DFSC -- design for supply chain this is a true intersection that helps look at a product in terms of supplier base continuity, storage, movement, and overall ability to move it through the chain, not just through the manufacturing portion of that process. Also, as my colleague, David Alschuler notes, PLM supports collaborative product design and design-for-manufacturability initiatives. These are both important threads in the effort to develop "partnership" across the supply chain. PLM supports the extension of design processes to include supply chain partners. And lifecycle issues are increasingly critical in managing the supply chain, whether around forecasting demand for new products or managing inventory as a product ramps down toward end-of-life. What customers and suppliers are working on together these days is quite frequently product concept and content -- whether component suppliers getting "design wins" in electronics or specialty ingredient makers helping their food customers lower saturated fats with new oil formulations. Most manufactured goods product lifecycles are shorter than ever, so the supply chain uncertainty that causes is increasing as well. Further, when you look at how critical engineering innovation and quality is to industries like electronics, automotive or aerospace and defense, it's difficult to not think of PLM as being immersed into the supply chain realm. Perhaps the greater point is that with new technologies that increase visibility and collaboration into various functions inside and outside of the enterprise (customer service and sales leap to mind), it is becoming increasingly difficult to define supply chain management into a neat model. Obviously, a model is just that. However, there is a valid argument out there that just as SCOR added returns to its original model, it might be time to rethink where PLM sits in the existing equation. |