At the CSCMP 2007 (Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals) held this week in Philadelphia, keynote speaker Carly Fiorina, former CEO of Hewlett-Packard, talked about some of the highlights of her career with HP in respect to supply chain.

Even though she could inspire some people, I heard that supply chain guys like Dan Gilmore of Supply Chain Digest were not that satisfied. The thing is she is not really a supply chain person and when she was at HP, she didn´t really put SCM at the top of the list. Anyway, these are some of the highlights of her keynote speech which I read in Industry Week:

Carly Fiorina talked about her choice to focus on the total customer experience and satisfaction which she said is the leading indicator of how well a company will do in the future. At HP for example, due to the organization's structure ,customers were often unable to receive all of the different pieces of their order at the same time. From a customer standpoint this was not acceptable.

Looking at the structure she found that the state of the supply chain did not allow HP to use its bargaining power based on the size of its spend. That changed when the supply chain was narrowed to five.

One of the other points she mentioned was on the subject of measurements and the example that when the workforce was measured on innovation, the number of patents increased to a point where the company receives 11 per day. They are now recognized as of the top three innovative companies. - a big leap from just five years ago where they didn't rank in the top 25.