While supply chain best practices may form the foundation on which companies can compete more effectively against other value chains, they are by no means an end goal in themselves, and there is no single set of best practices that can be applied wholesale to different organizations.

These cautionary comments were made at a recent Computerworld roundtable discussion on Industry Insights: The Supply Chain.

"I dislike the phrase "best practices" or "global templating"," said Teo Chin Seng, chief information officer of Singapore Technologies Engineering. He felt that the idea of a monolithic method of best practices is over-used, for example, "Here are best practices No 1 to 10 ? why are you not doing seven of them?" As he pointed out, "As an end user, supply chain management (SCM) is about the ability to react rather than the ability to follow. If we are not able to react, I do not think global templating will help us much."

The fact is, he emphasized, "we are competitive because we are different".

Daniel Wright, director, Strategic Solutions, South Asia, SSA Global Technologies, agreed. "Each business adds value to the supply chain, but how do we do that? How do we become a specialist in our field? If we do not understand our own business model, what is unique about our company, then we are in danger."

Best practices, in themselves, do not really change that much, observed Wright. But it is important to examine them in the context of the business as a whole. "Companies have to go one or two steps further to understand their end customers," he said.

What best practices provide are "a foundation and not the end point in itself", said Wee Hian Siew, chief operating officer of CSA Singapore. They are meant to help companies to become more competitive and as such, companies have to move themselves "to a point nearer to best practices".

This is especially important today as the whole baseline for competition has moved up.

As Vijaykumar Shah, senior vice president of Logipolis, pointed out, "Today, individual activity on the chain is taken for granted ? either you manage it or you"re out of business. The world has changed from a command-driven economy to a pull-based one."

"At the retail end, people are saying what they want and that information has to flow through the supply chain," he said. "People invest in IT not for internal process improvement ?nowadays that is taken as a given ? but what they want is the ability to service customers better."

As Wright put it, "The price of admission has increased".

Driven by customer requirements, companies, even small ones, need clear investment in technology and have to focus on improving their supply chain.

At taxi operator Comfort Transportation, the talk has shifted from transaction-based operations ? customer pickup, drop off, transaction completed ? to customer-driven supply chains.

"Now we have to think of retaining the customer, capturing additional knowledge of the customer to make the supply chain more proactive and automated, so the customer spends less time on the booking process. If you call, we know who you are, and we"ll try to get you to call us back the next time."

At STATS ChipPAC, which provides semiconductor test services, customers have begun to demand better visibility into the supply chain. "Now customers are interested in the status of production and issues that we may have on the line," said Dr Justin Lim, vice president of Information Technology.

According to Lim, Stats ChipPac retains its business edge through a lot of specialization in its "private processes", for example, how information is provided to customers and how it is integrated into internal processes. "Vendors say they can do web services and they come in with general technology but not the business value," he said. "A lot of business value lies within the company."

Given these disparate scenarios, Han Chung Heng, general manager of IBM Singapore Systems and Technology Group, pointed out that there is no "one size fits all" set of best practices in the supply chain.

What he suggests, instead, is a supply chain approach that keeps the end goal in mind. "Often, we look at the supply chain from the supply base, but that can cause problems," he said. "We build the integration upwards from the base, but by the time we reach the end point, the benefits are not there. As we move upstream, the effort loses steam."

What companies could do, instead, is to look at the end goal and to define parameters such as the required level of responsiveness or adaptiveness required of the supply chain.

For example, if you want a response time of seven days end-to-end, you build backwards to achieve that, said Han. "It is not so much a specific methodology but an approach."

"Start from the client"s point of view," he advised. "If every part of the supply chain can save 2-3 per cent, the whole chain can become very efficient."