Supply Chain for Startups


Book Description

Creating, launching, and scaling a product is one of the hardest things a person can do. As many entrepreneurs know all too well, creating a great product is only half the battle. You can engineer a brilliant product, design it for manufacturing, and engage millions of interested customers, but if you don’t design your supply chain well, they will never receive it. A great supply chain is as essential to a startup as good design, engineering, and marketing. In this book, you’ll learn how to design a supply chain out of nothing and scale it efficiently and effectively. Unlike many books on supply chain, you’ll find targeted supply chain advice for entrepreneurs, not a jargon-filled textbook. You’ll discover the threads that run through the supply chain of every successful startup and how to apply them to your company. This book is your essential guide to building and launching your product and supply chain right the first time.




Disrupting Logistics


Book Description

This book presents trends, developments, and examples of how digital disruption is currently reshaping the logistics industry. Logistics is the invisible force behind the global economy, influencing and providing a lens into all economic activities. Chapters written by respected experts in the field describe how new technologies such as autonomous vehicles, blockchain, Internet of things (IoT), and state-of-the-art freight management solutions are fundamentally changing supply chain solutions. Special emphasis is placed on promising start-ups and venture capital firms around the world that are now investing in the future of logistics. "Supply chains hold significant room for optimization to the benefit of customers, industry participants, authorities and the environment. This book provides a unique set of perspectives from industry leaders covering a wide range of topics. It is a ‘must read’ for anyone seeking to understand and contribute to a better tomorrow in supply chains logistics." — Thomas Bagge, Chief Executive Officer and Statutory Director DCSA “The need for standardisation and digitalisation in logistics is no longer an option. This book gives insights from industry experts, shows trends and innovations in platforms, underlines the need for transparency and how big data and analytics can make a world of difference. It’s an incredible resource if you wish to better understand the new normal of logistics.” — Global Chief Digital & Information Officer, MSC Mediterranean Shipping Company "This book presents readers with a straightforward and comprehensive assessment of supply chain innovation and trends and their impact on the industry. With contributions from several industry leaders, it provides critical knowledge and insight that supply chain and logistics managers need to implement disruptive technologies strategically.” — Rene Jacquat, Founder / Advisor, LogiChain Solutions




The Startup Way


Book Description

Entrepreneur and bestselling author of The Lean Startup, Eric Ries reveals how entrepreneurial principles can be used by businesses of all kinds, ranging from established companies to early-stage startups, to grow revenues, drive innovation, and transform themselves into truly modern organizations, poised to take advantage of the enormous opportunities of the twenty-first century. In The Lean Startup, Eric Ries laid out the practices of successful startups – building a minimal viable product, customer-focused and scientific testing based on a build-measure-learn method of continuous innovation, and deciding whether to persevere or pivot. In The Startup Way, he turns his attention to an entirely new group of organizations: established enterprises like iconic multinationals GE and Toyota, tech titans like Amazon and Facebook, and the next generation of Silicon Valley upstarts like Airbnb and Twilio. Drawing on his experiences over the past five years working with these organizations, as well as nonprofits, NGOs, and governments, Ries lays out a system of entrepreneurial management that leads organizations of all sizes and from every industry to sustainable growth and long-term impact. Filled with in-the-field stories, insights, and tools, The Startup Way is an essential road map for any organization navigating the uncertain waters of the century ahead.




Who Says I Can't


Book Description

This book is about what effect suddenly becoming disabled and hearing you have zero chance of survival has on someone’s personality and how one can not only survive, but also fight back, recover, and thrive. This is not a "cancer book." Those are written when the survival is new and fresh and the experience is raw. Instead, this book, written with more than a thirty-eight-year perspective, is about human perseverance, adaptability, and strength aimed not solely at those dealing with cancer or amputation but at everyone who at some point in their lives will inevitably have to deal with some sort of knock-down or major setback.




Supply Chain Management For Dummies


Book Description

Everyone can impact the supply chain Supply Chain Management For Dummies helps you connect the dots between things like purchasing, logistics, and operations to see how the big picture is affected by seemingly isolated inefficiencies. Your business is a system, made of many moving parts that must synchronize to most efficiently meet the needs of your customers—and your shareholders. Interruptions in one area ripple throughout the entire operation, disrupting the careful coordination that makes businesses successful; that's where supply chain management (SCM) comes in. SCM means different things to different people, and many different models exist to meet the needs of different industries. This book focuses on the broadly-applicable Supply Chain Operations Reference (SCOR) Model: Plan, Source, Make, Deliver, Return, and Enable, to describe the basic techniques and key concepts that keep businesses running smoothly. Whether you're in sales, HR, or product development, the decisions you make every day can impact the supply chain. This book shows you how to factor broader impact into your decision making process based on your place in the system. Improve processes by determining your metrics Choose the right software and implement appropriate automation Evaluate and mitigate risks at all steps in the supply chain Help your business function as a system to more effectively meet customer needs We tend to think of the supply chain as suppliers, logistics, and warehousing—but it's so much more than that. Every single person in your organization, from the mailroom to the C-suite, can work to enhance or hinder the flow. Supply Chain Management For Dummies shows you what you need to know to make sure your impact leads to positive outcomes.




Unlocking the Customer Value Chain


Book Description

Based on eight years of research visiting dozens of startups, tech companies and incumbents, Harvard Business School professor Thales Teixeira shows how and why consumer industries are disrupted, and what established companies can do about it—while highlighting the specific strategies potential startups use to gain a competitive edge. There is a pattern to digital disruption in an industry, whether the disruptor is Uber, Airbnb, Dollar Shave Club, Pillpack or one of countless other startups that have stolen large portions of market share from industry leaders, often in a matter of a few years. As Teixeira makes clear, the nature of competition has fundamentally changed. Using innovative new business models, startups are stealing customers by breaking the links in how consumers discover, buy and use products and services. By decoupling the customer value chain, these startups, instead of taking on the Unilevers and Nikes, BMW’s and Sephoras of the world head on, peel away a piece of the consumer purchasing process. Birchbox offered women a new way to sample beauty products from a variety of companies from the convenience of their homes, without having to visit a store. Turo doesn't compete with GM. Instead, it offers people the benefit of driving without having to own a car themselves. Illustrated with vivid, indepth and exclusive accounts of both startups, and reigning incumbents like Best Buy and Comcast, as they struggle to respond, Unlocking the Customer Value Chain is an essential guide to demystifying how digital disruption takes place – and what companies can do to defend themselves.




Reverse Innovation in Health Care


Book Description

Health-Care Solutions from a Distant Shore Health care in the United States and other nations is on a collision course with patient needs and economic reality. For more than a decade, leading thinkers, including Michael Porter and Clayton Christensen, have argued passionately for value-based health-care reform: replacing delivery based on volume and fee-for-service with competition based on value, as measured by patient outcomes per dollar spent. Though still a pipe dream here in the United States, this kind of value-based competition is already a reality--in India. Facing a giant population of poor, underserved people and a severe shortage of skills and capacity, some resourceful private enterprises have found a way to deliver high-quality health care, at ultra-low prices, to all patients who need it. This book shows how the innovations developed by these Indian exemplars are already being practiced by some far-sighted US providers--reversing the typical flow of innovation in the world. Govindarajan and Ramamurti, experts in the phenomenon of reverse innovation, reveal four pathways being used by health-care organizations in the United States to apply Indian-style principles to attack the exorbitant costs, uneven quality, and incomplete access to health care. With rich stories and detailed accounts of medical professionals who are putting these ideas into practice, this book shows how value-based delivery can be made to work in the United States. This "bottom-up" change doesn't require a grand plan out of Washington, DC, agreement between entrenched political parties, or coordination among all players in the health-care system. It needs entrepreneurs with innovative ideas about delivering value to patients. Reverse innovation has worked in other industries. We need it now in health care.




The Supply Chain Revolution


Book Description

Every year, more businesses fail because of their old-school views toward cutting costs, and they usually begin with the supply chain. Discover how the right supply chain can actually help you thrive. Across a range of industries, once-leading companies are in trouble: Walmart, IBM, Pfizer, HP, and The Gap to name a few, while others are thriving. The difference is how the company’s leaders view their supply chain: Is it just about cutting cost or do they see its hidden tools for outperforming the competition? Steve Jobs, upon returning to Apple in 1997, focused on transforming the supply chain. He hired Tim Cook--and the company sped up the development of new products, getting them into consumers' hands faster. The rest is history. While competitors were shutting stores, Zara’s highly responsive supply chain made it the most valued company in the retail space and its founder, the richest man in Europe. In The Supply Chain Revolution, business leaders will learn to: Make alliances more successful Simplify and debottleneck the supply chain Boost retail success by managing store investment Improve customer satisfaction and increase revenue Showcasing real solutions learned from true success stories like these and many others, The Supply Chain Revolution provides you with the secrets to succeeding in a disruptive world.




The Lean Startup


Book Description

Most startups fail. But many of those failures are preventable. The Lean Startup is a new approach being adopted across the globe, changing the way companies are built and new products are launched. Eric Ries defines a startup as an organization dedicated to creating something new under conditions of extreme uncertainty. This is just as true for one person in a garage or a group of seasoned professionals in a Fortune 500 boardroom. What they have in common is a mission to penetrate that fog of uncertainty to discover a successful path to a sustainable business. The Lean Startup approach fosters companies that are both more capital efficient and that leverage human creativity more effectively. Inspired by lessons from lean manufacturing, it relies on “validated learning,” rapid scientific experimentation, as well as a number of counter-intuitive practices that shorten product development cycles, measure actual progress without resorting to vanity metrics, and learn what customers really want. It enables a company to shift directions with agility, altering plans inch by inch, minute by minute. Rather than wasting time creating elaborate business plans, The Lean Startup offers entrepreneurs—in companies of all sizes—a way to test their vision continuously, to adapt and adjust before it’s too late. Ries provides a scientific approach to creating and managing successful startups in a age when companies need to innovate more than ever.




The Cold Start Problem


Book Description

A startup executive and investor draws on expertise developed at the premier venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and as an executive at Uber to address how tech’s most successful products have solved the dreaded "cold start problem”—by leveraging network effects to launch and scale toward billions of users. Although software has become easier to build, launching and scaling new products and services remains difficult. Startups face daunting challenges entering the technology ecosystem, including stiff competition, copycats, and ineffective marketing channels. Teams launching new products must consider the advantages of “the network effect,” where a product or service’s value increases as more users engage with it. Apple, Google, Microsoft, and other tech giants utilize network effects, and most tech products incorporate them, whether they’re messaging apps, workplace collaboration tools, or marketplaces. Network effects provide a path for fledgling products to break through, attracting new users through viral growth and word of mouth. Yet most entrepreneurs lack the vocabulary and context to describe them—much less understand the fundamental principles that drive the effect. What exactly are network effects? How do teams create and build them into their products? How do products compete in a market where every player has them? Andrew Chen draws on his experience and on interviews with the CEOs and founding teams of LinkedIn, Twitch, Zoom, Dropbox, Tinder, Uber, Airbnb, and Pinterest to offer unique insights in answering these questions. Chen also provides practical frameworks and principles that can be applied across products and industries. The Cold Start Problem reveals what makes winning networks thrive, why some startups fail to successfully scale, and, most crucially, why products that create and compete using the network effect are vitally important today.