My friends Joe Tillman and Kate Vitasek have written a very timely article discussing the "perfect order." What they point out is that, while service providers may have "perfect order fulfillment" as their goal, you won't get there if you don't have as your measure of perfection the same measure as your customer.

They do use a very timely approach, expressing the perfect order in terms that would satsify Ralphie, from "A Christmas Story." The article is well worth your read.

In this episode, I talk with Alan Day, the owner and managing director of State of Flux, a company focused on helping companies improve Supply Relationship Management (SRM). We talk about the importance of these relationships, understanding the complexities and nuances in SRM, and some of the ways State of Flux works with businesses.

Alan provided an article he has written, sharing with us his view on "A Winning Position." Take the time to download it and read it!

Are you a Supply Chain Professional that is on Twitter? We are developing a community of Supply Chain folks that are twitter. We are simply registering our Twitter name, and SC areas of interest, in a Google form, and then when you view the published form, you can see all those who have also "self-identified" as Supply Chain Twitterers.

I was involved in a research effort where we explored industry “best practices” in achieving “Outcome Focused Performance.” In a nutshell, we were trying to discover how the best organizations subjugate what they do to the Outcome (with a capital O) that they hoped to achieve.

I talk with Ken Lyon, Managing Director of Bit Logistics, and with Jean-Baptiste Perrin, responsible for Support and Marketing at BitLogistics. They share with us their approach to delivering what some call "Software as a Service" (SaaS), or software available "On-Demand". Solutions like this are one facet of the "Cloud Computing" phenomena and they explain that it enables supply chain partners to more readily share appropriate information in a timely way.

I talk with Tony Pittman about "Services Supply Chains" and how that is similar to, and different from, product oriented supply chains. Tony shares with us some of the unique and interesting challenges associated with this, and then he turns the tables on me, asking what students say when we start talking about services rather than products. We also talk about how Tony went from engineering to supply chains.

I talk once again with Gyöngyi Kovács, using the magic of Skype, about Humanitarian Logistics and Supply Chains. To learn more about Professor Kovács, visit her profile at http://www.hanken.fi/staff/kovacs/. She has a strong research and personal interest in sustainment, and in humanitarian supply chain issues. Visit http://humloggroup.org to learn more.

We chat with Dr Peter Swan from Penn State University, in Harrisburg. His recent study (with Michael Belzer of Wayne State University) found that increased privatization of highways may increase the traffic on what are perceived to be free roads (of course, they carry costs--just not directly billed.)

According to a Penn State press release:

The number of diverted trucks is important to both the State of Ohio and the nation for economic and social reasons.

I talk with Gyöngyi Kovács, using the magic of Skype, about Sustainable Supply Chains, and what it means to focus on sustainment as a core principle in supply chain management. To learn more about Professor Kovács, visit her profile at http://www.hanken.fi/staff/kovacs/. She has a strong research and personal interest in sustainment, and in humanitarian supply chain issues. Visit http://humloggroup.org to learn more.

This is the second half of Kate Vitasek's presentation on Performance Based Logistics at CSCMP in Philadelphia. Kate is the founder, and Managing Partner, of Supply Chain Visions. You can reach Kate via email at: kate@scvisions.com