The Systems Approach to Analysing Supply Chains and Improving Their Performance

One critical weakness of traditional company-wide business improvement models, which are often based on systems thinking, is that the focus is largely on a company’s internal operations and business processes. As a result of the increasingly complex global supply chains of which companies are part, improving ones own business is no guarantee of success in today’s business environment. This paper describes an extension of traditional systems approaches beyond the operations of an individual company to the complete supply chain. The result is the systems approach to analysing supply chains and improving their performance.