CFO magazine is poaching on our turf - again.  Or, maybe they're beginning to get the importance of supply chain management, with a more-or-less regular supply chain column.  This time out (the March 2010 issue, also available at www.cfo.com), they've promoted supply chain stratgeies as tools to improve cash flow.

A favored technique appears to be for companies to shift away from traditional products and methods, and toward a different set of core products, more sophisticated, higher-tech, and higher-margin marketplace offerings.  Interesting, and valid, at least from a CFO's perspective.

But, who fills the vacuum when trading partners can no longer rely on long-time suppliers for nuts-and-bolts parts or commodity materials?  Who builds business relationships with new supply chain partners?  And, how long does that process take?

Can the companies in question quickly convince their old supply chain partners that they are the right partners for a new population of recently-developed and more complex set of offerings?

Ironically, the same issue of CFO suggests that it may be time to accelerate the pace of advancement of CFO's to the CEO's corner office suite.  Coincidence?  Perhaps not.

I'm not saying that these strategic moves are wrong, and I'll cheerfully acknowledge that the companies are appropriately in business to make money.  I am suggesting, though, that they're not as easy to execute as a snap of the fingers in the boardroom.  And, they might not be, contrary to the received wisdom of newly-minted B-school graduates, right for every company.  In the event, no organization contemplating such a strategic restructuring can afford to lose sight of the reality that supply chains are far more involved in their complex dynamics than any one company's insular focus on itself alone.