ABOUT VALUE CHAIN MANAGEMENT

Value Chain Management seeks to understand, to design and to control the entire network of relevant business partners in order to provide superior customer value and to ensure sustainable economic development of those partners as well as other interest groups.

According to a recently developed Delphi study, the most important key challenges which the world economy is facing in the near future are the following:

• Meeting short term economic needs but at the same time taking care to ensure that the environment is exploited in such a way that future generations have the same opportunities and chances as we have.
• Coping with the following contrasting issues: the massive gulf between rich and poor; stable versus tense political conditions; well educated and illiterate populations; countries with high debt and countries lending money.
• Coping with the unbalanced availability of rescources and demographic and socio-economic developments and environmental changes.

The Value Chain Management initiative tries to contribute to meeting these challenges by addressing essential open questions in Value Chain Management, in particular:

• How to manage the shift from self-interest of stakeholders to customer perceived value and sustainable economic development of all relevant partners; how to measure value chain performance and how to share the reward among the partners.
• How to coordinate, control and monitor networks, actors and processes including aspects to volatility, risk, complexity, hyper competition and the pace of market change.
• How the decision making process works in a network which bears in mind the interplay of individual behavioral aspects.