Caso Dupont

Corporate Spotlight
By Jennifer Proctor

Supply Chain Management as a Transformation Strategy
DuPont discovers a new kind of miracle
DuPont is a $26.5 billion, multinational company with headquarters in Wilmington, Delaware. Its leaders believe in “the miracles of science,” which also serves as the company’s tagline. However, with operations in more than 70 countries and diverse productlines—including those for agriculture, nutrition, electronics, communications, home and construction, and more—DuPont leaders sought to find some “miracles of supply chain performance.”
Five years ago, DuPont decision makers made a commitment to invest in supply chain management, something that had not been a priority in the past. To move forward, they pledged to disseminate supply chain knowledge;develop supply chain processes; and nurture the people who could share them to ultimately deliver business results. Economic hard times are a reality these days for organizations large and small. However, throughout the recession, DuPont’s business goals have remained the same. DuPont leaders seek to reduce costs; improve productivity; and, above all, meet customer service commitments safely andreliably. They see an integrated supply chain as the key to helping them meet these goals. In short, at DuPont, supply chain is the core business process that serves the entire corporation. DuPont leaders credit their corporate survival and success during the recession to their employees’ strong supply chain knowledge, which has given them visibility across business units. DuPont started in thisarena with kaizen, lean,

“We didn’t form the network with the crisis in mind, but we did put it to good use.”
and six sigma. Once low-cost sourcing was added, supply chain management was a natural segue. Still, no one could anticipate the speed of the economic decline. Once the recession was evident, leaders quickly identified the need for cash, and they had to drive management overrides intoDuPont’s production to reduce inventory, says Mathieu Vrijsen, former senior vice president of global operations. DuPont executives also called together a corporate crisis committee. The group focused on variable contributions, expense spending, capital spending, and working capital. “We furiously had to take costs down to lower our break-even point,” says Don Wirth, DuPont vice president ofintegrated supply chain. One main priority

at the executive level is to create a more responsive and agile supply chain across DuPont’s variety of business units. The organization’s leaders emphasize supply chain management best practices and use knowledgeable supply chain teams. In tandem, these efforts enabled employees to move quickly in response to the economic downturn, despite the marketsfreefalling and customer demand shrinking. Almost immediately, employees adjusted demand input—even overriding enterprise systems—in order to match production and inventory. In short, DuPont went back to basics. Leaders leaned heavily on employees who had APICS training and certifications—tapping the supply chain resources already available to them. Those with supply chain knowledge immediately went towork training others. DuPont leaders had been building supply chain management competency within the organization, but it’s the economic crisis that made imperative the standardization of supply chain ideas and their effective application. Business started to rely on demand planning; raw-material planning; finish-to-stock, package-toorder, and make-to-order strategies; tightened delivery schedules;logistics flexibility; and effective sales and operations planning. Many new or not fully developed organizational capabilities were called into action. In order to get a sense of what was happening in markets and with customers, groups had to collaborate. For example, a network of demand managers and planners started meeting just as the financial crisis began. Together, participants were able...