ABSTRACT
Managers at SB took up this kind of thinking about supply chain management and a new initiative, called the Enterprise program, was launched in 1996 with a view to improving supply chain processes across Worldwide Supply Operations (WSO) and Commercial Operations by the end of 1998. The key objective was to integrate and standardize the supply chain processes and systems, while adapting all systems for millennium compliance. Other objectives were to: link financial and volume forecasting so as to improve the quality of operational and financial planning; improve operational efficiency with the introduction of formal trading relationships between commercial and supply businesses; create an infrastructure to optimize plant to market flows. I was given a role in the Enterprise initiative and in order to convey some idea of my experience of participating in it, I want to describe an October 1997 meeting to review the Enterprise budget. I describe this meeting because, as a microcosm of the whole initiative, it illustrates the interactive process at play. In doing this, I am suggesting that it is in ordinary, everyday encounters between managers of the kind I will be describing that the shape of the whole supply chain reorganization and capability development emerged.
