Welcome back to another installment of Whitepaper Wednesday here on the Purchasing Certification Blog. Today, I’ll be reviewing a whitepaper entitled “Supply Chain Design:
Optimizing Your Supply Chain for Bottom-Line Results” from Fortna and Purchasing Magazine.

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Some whitepapers give solutions. Others simply give you things to think about. This whitepaper falls into the latter category.

Some of those “things to think about” include these questions for those designing or redesigning their supply chains:

• What is the optimal flow of goods from suppliers to our customers?
• What are the optimum number, location, and types of facilities needed throughout the network to meet service targets at minimal cost and tax burden?
• What capabilities must our facilities have, who will manage them, and what expectations do we have for performance?
• Where are our opportunities for improvement in costs, tax reduction, and asset utilization, and what investments will need to be made?

Now, don’t get me wrong – these are questions that you absolutely should ask. But the whitepapers that I’ve always found most valuable were those that gave guidance on how to answer those questions.

No answers here.

And, actually, the whitepaper turns into more of a brochure with the last 2-1/2 of its 7 pages dedicated to introducing you to Fortna’s capabilities. While the whitepaper does serve to show that Fortna understands the challenges of designing an optimized supply chain, they do hold their solutions quite close to the vest in this document. Nonetheless, if you care to download your own copy and form your own opinion, you may do so from Purchasing Magazine’s Web site (registration required).