Spending time with very diverse sets of businesses—from Combatant Commanders in the Military to Running Shoe/Sport Apparel catalogue businesses—the key focus area for the CEO is Performance Management across the business. And for supply chain executives, it is learning to align the performance elements in the supply chain to enable improved competitive position in your key markets. Performance Management is theme for this month.

First, creating a highly differentiated business strategy through creating customer experience is the discussion in The Interview with Joe Pine. Many of you have read some of Joe’s books, Mass Customization, Markets of One, etc. Joe is the maestro for firms who focus on the customer and grow markets share through highly differentiated services, products and processes.

From creating the customer experience, we then have been managing the customer service. We have two key articles in this issue. We are pleased to have a submission from Dr. Morris Cohen, (another maestro—of the Service Chain): Service Supply Chain Strategies Increase Corporate Profitability. I think that the service chain is just beginning to get much deserved attention. In fact, managing the information in this chain will change the way firms make money, with performance driven directives, contracts and services for customers. To further discuss these topics, we have a webinar on June 22 with Dr. Morris Cohen and a guest speaker from Cisco Systems, Jim Riley who will discuss accomplishments at Cisco.

Beyond Parallax View, to enhance the topic of being Performance Driven, there is a Supply Chain Performance Management event in July we are participating with in partnership with ASMI. This event is all about Supply Chain Performance, with highly instructive topics on various performance metric techniques and will include topics on increasing shareholder value, customer service, decreasing supply chain costs, from some of the leading firms in manufacturing, transportation and academics.

Back to Parallax View, we are pleased to have an article from our European partners eKNOWtion, who are real experts on the SCM Performance, writing about the Balanced Scorecard in Supply Chain.

We are also co-hosting another RFID primer workshop on June 29th. This will provide a foundation for RFID technology and application vendors.

Jimi Hendrix once said, “Knowledge speaks, but wisdom listens”. Meeting others and attending events becomes an important channel to gain knowledge and wisdom.

So, ChainLink is announcing our first event, planned for September 13th and 14th in Charleston, South Carolina. You will hear about supply chain as you have never heard it before. Save the date!

Spend every moment of this life giving something to it, rather than waiting waiting waiting.

Ann