CMS Article: Keeping Tabs
General motors one of the leading automakers was started in 1908, and employs approximately 252,000 workers worldwide. Being a large manufacturer it contracts with large supply series and they have to segregate them into different levels for handling purposes. One of there main suppliers supply different chemicals used to make the cars. Not only does GM have to deal with the number of vendors per chemical they supply, but they have to deal with the mounting environmental legislations. Due to the number of different departments, each department made there own chemical orders and this increased paper work as thousands of chemicals were trailed. GM managers decided to move from a materials-acquisition mind-set to one of product life cycle (Atkinson 25). This started a program called chemical management services.
A chemical management service is a solution founded by General Motors which involves the budge in the philosophy of users and suppliers from chemical-as material to chemical-as-service. By this small intangible adjustment GM was able to reduce wastage such as chemical expirations and in turn this reduced costs in every department that had been streamlined with this concept. With all the gains that GM was making based on this new CMS program approach, a charitable organization called Pew fulfilled that its habitual advance to increase the industry’s environmental responsibility was turning out to be less effective than it had hoped. Something else was needed to persuade industry to put social and environmental payoffs on an equal footing with money—in foundation terms, to adopt a “triple bottom line” (Atkinson 25).
Chemical Strategies Partnership, a spun off from pew charitable organization, was founded in 1996 there mandate was to expand the chemical-as-service concept as far as possible. Just as GM was influenced to distribute its information of CMS for the public good, so the CSP has started to publicize its know-how abroad.
Supply Chain Trust Article
Supply chain trust is viewed by management to be a very rare commodity, more so when it comes to a relationship where power is one-sided. Trust is the source of dexterity, of plasticity and yet it is a challenge to institute it and even harder to uphold it. The word trust is not new in the supply chain industry but it keeps on acquiring a huge share of consideration from supply practitioners. Researchers have set out to learn what trust means to a supply chain managers and what they thought the significance of it is. For the researchers to succeed and capture responses driven by channel power they had to design a methodology to be used.
Case studies and surveys were the two main methods used by the researchers. Questions were formulated for the survey method and one-on-one interviews were done on the case study method. As managers discussed other necessary elements of strong alliances, the importance of trust was magnified. Measuring the “collaborative,” “mutual,” “shared,” or “willing” aspects of key attributes is an elusive challenge (Fawcett et al. 22). Most managers seemed to agree that trust is a wishful thinking and not practiced at all which makes it sad but true. Some managers even admitted that there is not trust within their own organizations suggesting that trust is an attitudinal or cultural occurrence.
Five dimensions have been discovered by researchers that can build a trust enabled culture;
The performance dimension; trust depends on consistently doing what one says they are going to do. If a supplier agrees to supply certain products and then they do not deliver.
Information sharing dimension; open communication has to exist for this dimension to be successful. Not just passing on information that one thinks is needed and sieving out the rest.
Behavioral dimension; this is the sharing of the risks and the accomplishments. If companies treat suppliers well they will also benefit from the incentives that suppliers will often pass on to them.
Personal dimension; supply and purchase go hand-in-hand, most suppliers they don’t trust purchases because this is where cost is involved. There is to be that personal trust between the two for a good relationship to exist.
The “two world” dimesion; the buyer as the power and the suppliers do not. By rule of thumb the customer is always right, in the case of the buyer it gives them the upper hand to negotiate pricing and sometimes can quote ludicrous prices. The supplier and buyer have to decide on a common ground so they can work in harmony.
Works Cited
Atkinson, William Illsey. “Keeping Tabs: Chemical management services open the door to greener
industrial chemistry.” Feb 2004. Today’s Chemist at Work. 25 May 2010
http://pubs.acs.org/subscribe/journals/tcaw/13/i02/pdf/204systems.pdf;
Fawcett, Stanley E., Gregory M. Magnan, and Alvin J. Williams, “Supply Chain Trust is
Within Your Grasp,” Supply Chain Management Review, Vol. 8, No. 2, March 2004, p. 20-
26.
