Value chain management: developing a more valuable and certain future

A value chain is the overall set of internal and external resources – human, physical, financial and informational – that require to be marshalled and managed in order to achieve the objectives of any organisation. The management focus is on optimising net added value for the end-user, and for all of the key participants in the chain, through defining and managing the entire value chain from beginning to end, by enhancing performance, speed, certainty, safety and security at a low total cost, and at understood and accepted levels of uncertainty and risk. This guide describes the processes of value chain management and says that it is vital that value chain management becomes a core component of all management education. Furthermore, all professional training needs a far greater emphasis on the ‘hard’ skills of managing internal and external resources in a disciplined way in order to deliver agreed, realistic results, rather than overemphasising soft skills that, however necessary, are insufficient to deliver cost-effective performance. The failure to understand and employ value chain management results in worse outcomes at greater cost than need be