• Respond to rapidly changing customer demands for customization and quality at  the lowest cost; demands that are driving ever-evolving business models.
• Keep pace with intense, global competition driven by players like Amazon, Uber  and Alibaba that continually change the rules of the game
• Respond to disruptive forces such as the Internet of Things (IoT), 3-D Printing, Artificial Intelligence, Robotics Process Automation

The ability to lead successful transformations requires addressing organizational, cultural and leadership factors to create:

• A new ability to mobilize the entire organization to move as fast as possible to  build the future
• A Supply Chain leadership team that is not focused on optimizing results for the  one slice of business they manage, but that can think and act as a collective unit and is willing to share accountability and work toward delivering collective results.
• Improved methods for learning and leading as top-down hierarchical corporate  mandates give way to distributed decision making.

[FAILURE POINTS]

Oracle has observed through the years that business transformations, especially in supply chain, are notoriously slow and a super majority of the initiatives fail. 
Several reasons for failure have come to light:

• Lack of understanding, agreement and commitment to strategic goals leads to collections of disparate plans across the supply chain
• Even with a slight misalignment of goals, people get confused and fearful of taking action, and afraid to ask if they’ve misunderstood.
• Supply chain teams are not adequately prepared to adjust as key strategic initiatives start to bump up against the reality of the marketplace
• Supply chain teams continue to pursue new efficiencies by leaning out processes in each vertical silo, efforts that no longer produce meaningful cost savings. Future performance improvement prizes hide at the intersections between supply chain disciplines, across other business functions and in new connections to suppliers and customers.
• Teams lack the commitment they need from senior management to drive successful collaborations, and fail to employ tactics such as benefit sharing with partners to overcome differences in strategic priorities

[NEW PRACTICES TO IMPROVE SUCCESS RATES]

• If employees are to thrive in a digital environment and take safe risks, the organization must provide the supportive and transparent environment in which they and the organization can learn. It’s not a matter of the organization just deciding to be more experimental.
  - Build leaders comfort to adopt constant experimentation and process iteration as ways to reduce risk
  - Instill new confidence in employees, and in employees’ view of leadership team, that everyone knows where they are going and why
  - Build the desire to outperform those who are working to disrupt the industry
• Develop a unifying supply chain theory that becomes the roadmap for strategic actions, use of resources and future investments
  - Frame strategic conversation to help senior team envision much broader landscape than current market position
  - Invite leaders and teams into the strategic conversation to encourage strategic thinking and strategic decision making, and to support each other in making the necessary tradeoffs. 
  - Prepare leaders to robustly defend the decisions being made
  - Leaders must create openness and transparency to guide mission critical objectives. Teams can identify barriers early to highlight misaligned priorities, plans that don’t integrate, and redundant or competing efforts.
• Supply chain teams must master collaboration that emphasizes horizontal interactions. Collaborative work must engage diverse groups with varied expertise and experiences and across geographic regions, in order to apply their combined knowledge to improve cycle times, reduce inventories and reach goals for on-time, in-full deliveries.
  - Emphasize horizontal interactions
  - Use peer-to-peer engagement to create true community
• Stop the persistent debates and address the unanswered questions that keep people waiting vs. doing
  - Make the case for shifting the organization clock to hyper speed
  - Achieve mass mobilization to engage and motivate all teams across the enterprise