CSCMP Member Steven Bowen Discusses His Latest Book, "Total Value Optimization: Transforming Your Supply Chain into a Competitive Weapon"

A company’s supply chain is more than a set of procurement, logistics and operations rules and relationships. According to Steven J. Bowen, Maine Pointe CEO, CSCMP member and author of Total Value Optimization: Transforming your global supply chain into a competitive weapon, a global supply chain can be a powerful competitive weapon capable of driving new levels of growth.
 
The book is the definitive guide to Total Value Optimization (TVO)™, a business methodology which transforms the traditional cost-driven supply chain approach to one of finding value drivers for cost, cash and growth, and creating an action plan to achieve them through the end-to-end supply chain. Throughout the book, Bowen takes the reader on a step-by-step journey through the optimization process, illustrating some of the most common vulnerabilities and how to extract the substantial value that is often hidden in the end to end supply chain.
 
Bowen’s book is an engaging guide for any corporate executive, aimed at CEOs through to entry level managers who want to learn how to optimize their supply chains. Throughout the book, he addresses new-economy challenges and solutions for corporate leaders who find themselves under increasing pressure to deliver on performance. He makes the TVO journey engaging and understandable, with dozens of real-world examples of successes and failures in the corporate world. Going beyond textbook explanation, Bowen draws against his deep knowledge of the history and evolution of business. He brings business methodology to life with a deep dive into actual examples from the corporate world to illustrate each point along the way.
 
A buy-make-move-fulfill supply chain is an enormously complex mechanism with a vast collection of moving parts and each part, no matter how small, matters. According to Bowen, “When you optimize enough of them, you start to see a dramatic difference.”
 
In his book, Bowen introduces the TVO Pyramid, a graphic depiction of the TVO journey, founded on data analytics and leader and organization improvement, with three core functional components of procurement, logistics and operations. While the concept of optimizing a global supply chain may seem overwhelming, Bowen breaks it down nicely, starting with a TVO assessment—a sort of “reality check” to determine where your company sits on the TVO maturity curve.
 
Total Value Optimization: Transforming Your Supply Chain into a Competitive Weapon is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.