Flow

By recognizing our supply chain's composition, learning its behaviors and optimizing it responsibly, we can be more resilient to unforeseen challenges and get ahead of discoverable, predictable changes.

In Flow, the authors raise some innovative, provocative, and in many instances counter-intuitive ideas on how companies can enhance their supply chain efficiency. This is a very valuable contribution to finding long-term supply chain solutions.

Linton and Handfield continue to challenge conventional supply chain heuristics. Even this deep into the twenty-first century, supply chains are too frequently understood - and managed - as a sequence of transactions. And they are too frequently managed retroactively, in response to events, rather than proactively, anticipating events. Applying principles from the physics of flow systems, the authors argue that our supply networks cannot remain rigid and static, but must evolve over time. This new conceptual approach importantly includes not just anticipating supply disruptions (i.e., supply risk) but also understanding changing demand signals, an often overlooked element of managing supply networks. Finally, this new way of thinking shifts attention from last century's static financial metric - i.e., cost. In this new way of understanding supply systems, the authors focus on free cash flow. An emphasis on cost ignores the many other ways in which companies inadvertently destroyed value, by increasing inventories, or ignoring obsolescence, or failing to understand how freight delays extended the cash conversion cycle. In contrast, free cash flow incorporates all these elements of working capital, allowing companies to understand better how their supply ecosystems create value holistically.

Linton and Handfield provide another, and timely, insightful look into the roots of supply chain performance. In a post-global world the 'laws' they reveal are essential reading to those wanting to understand or practice supply chain management.

Once again, Linton and Handfield provide great insight for today's C-suite, enabling them to build out actionable pathways for improved supply chain decision making. The authors' expertise and wisdom is shared throughout the book and is powerful for accelerating the flow and optimizing financial results.

Our supply chains are failing to keep up with our new world, where decades of established norms are shifting at unprecedented speeds. Tom and Rob have laid out the blueprint for how we can evolve our organizations to harness the unprecedented access to data, technology and innovation we now have. At a time when business leaders are trying to use up valuable cash for just-in-case inventories, they have shown us how SPEED, resulting from deeper visibility and stronger supplier relationships across tiers, can create fast-flowing supply chains that actually free up cash. A must read for business leaders.

Supply chain impacts grab the headlines and elevate logistics visibility as a business imperative. In this impressive illumination of the modern supply chain, Tom Linton and Rob Handfield explain the importance of thinking through this global movement of things by addressing the underlying rules that make it work.

Supply chains are the most complex system of transactions in our human civilization. Market principles of supply and demand bring them to life, but the physics of flow and friction explain their behavior. In a world threaded with connectivity but constrained by borders, we need sophisticated thinking to find the patterns that will shape the future of supply chains - and by extension, the world economy and geopolitics as well. This paradigm shifting new book by Handfield and Linton could not be better timed or reasoned.

The use of flows to explain and structure supply chain strategies and operations offers a powerful lens to integrate theories originated from physical laws with the evolving realities of supply chains. It provides the reader with insights and perspectives on how to innovate in this dynamic world.

This is an excellent book all supply chain practitioners should read to survive and thrive in this complex and interconnected world we now live in. There are many great real-life examples which are excellent and relevant.

This is the second collaboration between Tom Linton, who has led one of the largest and most complex supply chains in the world, and Rob Handfield, a thoughtful and creative academic. They use the lens of physics to develop powerful insights on important issues in supply chains, like the need for speed, visibility, and localization. This book is an excellent read for anyone who wants to see the supply chain of the future, now.

This is a great read for operations strategists and practitioners alike, who are looking to understand how to think through and navigate complexities of supply chain design. Leaning on creative parallels to fundamental laws that govern science, the book provides great insights into how one should think of optimization and evolution of supply chains in today's world.

Rob Handfield and Tom Linton shed a bright light on the most overlooked reality in the supply chain world: movement is money. This supply chain duo makes a compelling case that we will face big challenges in our increasingly VUCA world, where the physical realities - and physics - of supply chains will be pushed to the limit. A big takeaway is clear: the stakes are high, but the rewards will be great for those who can build and maintain resilient supply chains.