How viable is an organization without its customers? This is exactly why some organizations are moving from a demand-driven to a value-driven, customer-focused supply chain. It's a model that delivers an end-to-end customer experience from product or service inception through customer usage. To achieve this, an organization's global business operations must be aligned with the customer value chain approach. The operational metrics of the past (cost, speed, delivery time and the like) are replaced with customer-centric metrics that begin with the needs of the customer.

For one thing, by reorganizing your resources and aligning employees who are in separate functions into one function, organizations can eliminate the silos that impede a customer-focused approach. Supply management executives must examine how their organizations are organized and ask themselves if that model is conducive to operating as a value chain rather than a demand chain or supply chain.

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