Charles Poirier

Diagnosing Greatness is the first supply chain book targeted at all levels and functions of business management. It explains how business performance can be enhanced through a concerted effort to implement improvements across a full supply chain network. Using a significant amount of academic studies, published literature and documentation from annual global surveys among supply chain and logistics professionals conducted by Supply Chain Management Review magazine, Computer Sciences Corporation and Michigan State University, the authors combine their first-hand experiences to present a clear and impressive substantiation of what industry leading firms are accomplishing through supply chain efforts. Specifics are given across a wide variety of industries of how a limited number of firms have achieved positions of greatness as their supply chain efforts have matured and industry-best practices have emerged. The authors' basic approach was to isolate the best supply chains through documented accomplishments and then diagnose what led to their superior execution. Findings enabled the authors to articulate the top ten sustainable competencies or traits of greatness that distinguish the leaders from the followers. Each chapter within this book covers a trait which firms in any business can calibrate itself against and initiate a plan for achieving similar progress. Diagnosing Greatness shows how to achieve the greatest return, while better satisfying investors, suppliers, business customers and consumer groups. Using many case examples and actual action stories, the authors bring a new and higher dimension to business success by explaining how to optimize the process steps across an extended business enterprise; bring value to all constituents of a business enterprise, especially the end consumer; and achieve and maintain industry best business results.

Building on the philosophies of "total enterprise optimization," a program through which companies attain long-term results by committing to broad, lasting changes, a guide to improving growth and earnings discusses such techniques as supply chain management, improved quality concepts, and selective outsourcing.

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is one of the most talked about emerging technologies in business today. But is it a temporary fad or an unstoppable business improvement process? Because organizations such as Wal-Mart and the US Department of Defense (DoD) have endorsed RFID and are requiring key suppliers to be compliant as early as 2005, many businesses are currently in the process of evaluating and testing this new technology. As these actions play out, the list of promises and problems continue to grow as does the need to better understand what RFID is all about.RFID Strategic Implementation and ROI will help the reader comprehend the basics of RFID, the fundamental technology and components, the potential applications and business issues, and the marketplace forces at work in front of and behind the scenes. It will explain the links with supply chain management and develop an outline of costs and benefits. The authors demystify the issues and present a clear roadmap for implementation and adoption by manufacturers, distributors, retailers, and suppliers.

Acquire the roadmap for achieving success that relates specific process improvements to bottom-line profit growth. Business Process Management Applied: Creating the Value Managed Enterprise illustrates how process improvement can add value for firms of any size in any industry and the method for tracking those savings to financial statements, using a proven maturity model and a SCOR (R) model. It features a guiding framework and a presentation of the underlying architecture, including the basic elements of optimizing the extended enterprise, applying business process management (BPM) tools and techniques, and bringing increased value to all constituents of the networked enterprise - especially the end consumer. Business Process Management Applied is the only text that easily relates supply chain and BPM thinking into layman's terms. Businesses around the world are discovering the improvements possible through a focus on the key process steps contained in an end-to-end supply chain, generating five to eight points of new profit to the bottom line by creating a truly linked and optimized intelligent business network that delivers greater value to the organization.

The vision of the networked enterprise is now a reality. This cutting-edge book illustrates how to implement a new breakthrough BPM technology that will change the competitive business landscape. BPM gives businesses the means to manage processes across systems, people, and organizations, providing visibility and control over each instance of those processes right across the supply chain network.