Operative Profiles of Competitive Speed as a Systemic Mechanism of SCM Type Differentiation

If Time factor has always constituted a decisive element for the dynamics of the business competitive physiologies, the New Technologies advent –and amid them mainly the Internet platform– has determined the success, in terms of value generation, of strategic and operating models based on the drastic compression of business functioning and reaction Time. According to this direction, BPR (Business Process Re-Engineering) has revealed itself as an essential organisational philosophy, used in order to determine and recover inefficiency gaps within the business processes. Starting from this strategic and methodological basis, ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) models firstly and SCM (Supply Chain Management) models secondly have generated management solutions able to develop innovation and value as to enterprise and supply chain levels respectively. Indeed, one essential feature of SCM solutions is the compression of the Time of supply chain business functioning: the objective of the ICT and, above all, the process integration of the production and/or distribution chain –as in fact SCM is– is the elastic management of the Time of the supply chain process, considered in systemic terms not as an aggregation of single players processes, but as a wide macro-structure. No wonder as to this effort of vision, because among the different Software modules, called to handle the SCM management components, CPFR (acronym for Collaborative Planning, Forecasting and Replenishment) packages already exist: they can be similarly identified as a sort of electronic governance organ of the supply chain integrated process. So, it is possible to determine the three SCM designing stages (rationalisation, collaboration, integration), that require the business functioning Time stress: in fact, in the wide Total Quality Management dynamics, essential objective of the Marketing-Oriented vision is to shorten hype-efficiently every Time figure existing in the business physiology (Just-In-Time, Idle Time, Lead Time, Time-To-Market, Time-To-User, Throughput Time, general facility Mean-Time, Pay-Back Period, etc.). Competitive Speed, as a consequence, is the capacity of an enterprise, within a specific supply chain intended as a wide macro-structure, to react more rapidly than a Competitor, internal or external to the same supply chain, to the market exigencies. Then, the concept of Time-based enterprise seems to enrich with new competence thanks to the contribute of the systemic approach, that in this context is physiologically oriented to the SCM and not to the only specific structure, if intended as a single supply chain player. Competitive Speed seems to propose itself as an Economic Physics visionary concept, coherent to ‘speed’ type rules imposed by the New Economy and anyway constantly oriented to the overall generation of Customer Satisfaction.