Why Strategic Supply Chains Underperform – And What You Can Do About It
Drive performance by aligning your supply chain around what matters most
Most supply chains aren’t broken – they’re misaligned. Despite process improvements and KPIs, many strategic relationships still suffer from missed targets, escalating costs, and wasted effort. The root cause? A failure to understand and manage what truly matters to each party.
The Strategic Relationship Curve reveals a predictable pattern of underperformance driven by misalignment – of interests, expectations, and context. As complexity increases across suppliers, tiers, and partners, so does the risk of breakdown.
Success today isn’t about tighter control – it’s about deeper alignment. That means continuously surfacing, measuring, and acting on what each party values most.
This isn’t a soft skill – it’s a strategic shift. One that transforms supply chains from transactional networks into high-performance ecosystems.
The curve makes it visible. Value management makes it actionable.
Alignment, Resilience and Coherence (ARC) are the measures to harness complexity.
Supply chain success hinges on a shared foundation — common goals, trust, and clarity — that leaders instinctively grasp yet rarely have the opportunity to measure.
In a world awash with transactional data, these intangibles slip through the cracks, breeding waste and risk.
Quantify them, and you empower decisive, impactful action for resilient outcomes, ignore them and you’ll experience one or more of these situations:
Yet misalignment often goes unrecognized as the root cause of serious problems — until it’s too late to act.
Quickly start to gauge alignment
This free Alignment Diagnostic is the first step on the journey to success, giving you the chance to start gauging your internal alignment with a representative small group of people.
This powerful, easy-to-use diagnostic isn’t a survey — it’s a clear, structured assessment to quickly pinpoint your alignment and performance strengths, areas for improvement, and which actions will deliver the greatest impact.
Diagnostic Content
Surface, communicate and align around the following things that matter:
When you invite others to join you, your perspectives are gathered and reported back to you – uncovering misalignment and helping you align
ARC Value Management
ARC Value Management also has related solutions in the following areas:
Proven Benefits
Engage with the diagnostic to begin unlocking these real-world benefits
Gauge Alignment
identify where there is and isn’t convergence of opinion
Diagnose Issues
spot potential issues before they turn in to serious problems
Share Strengths
capture and share best practice to improve outcomes and motivation
Diagnostics Trusted by Supply Chain Leaders
More from Mick Harris on wider use of Diagnostics – full interview / highlights here.
Start Your Free Diagnostic Now
Align around things that matter
🎯 See how aligned your team is
đź‘Ą Identify areas of agreement
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Frequently Asked Questions
This is not just another survey.
We understand people get “survey fatigue”, but aside from some superficial similarities, the purpose, nature and outcomes of this diagnostic are entirely different to a survey:
This is a structured diagnostic tool for synthesizing, comparing and highlighting differences in perspectives.
It will not only reveal misalignments you wouldn’t otherwise see, but it will clarify them through the specific detail of the Value Codes – focused areas you will be evaluating.
We get it — there are many “silver bullets” out there.
This diagnostic isn’t a quick fix or a generic tool.
It’s a rigorous, collaborative process that uncovers hidden misalignments and overlooked value drivers that contracts and KPIs miss.
It helps your entire team see what’s really going on, so you can act with clarity and confidence:
- It’s proven to scale — but feels deeply personal.
- It builds insight before demanding action.
- It fits how people naturally learn, decide, and engage.
- It doesn’t impose or instruct — it invites and unlocks.
- Most importantly: it works where other efforts haven’t.
Alignment is a necessary foundation for success.
But it is very difficult to achieve and very difficult to know how far away you are from achieving it.
This diagnostic will give you an idea of where things really are, and establish a benchmark which you can return to later, to track change and evaluate the effectiveness of actions taken.
If everything is looking good, and if everyone agrees, then the diagnostic will start to substantiate this.
More likely, though, you’ll uncover areas of opportunity, where the diagnostic and report will:
True alignment doesn’t happen by accident.
Alignment happens when teams see their differences, discuss them openly, and take action together.
Absolutely.
Think of this as a powerful diagnostic lens that complements and enhances your current initiatives — helping to align efforts, prioritize actions, and avoid wasted time or conflicting approaches.
You’ll be asked to set a password to keep your responses secure (nothing will be shared with any third party).
After you’ve submitted your response, you can invite up to 6 other people to share their perspective.
Most participants complete it in under 30 minutes, and immediately after submitting their response, they each receive a personalized report that presents back and highlights aspects of what they have said.
When all participants have submitted responses, a more detailed report is generated that synthesizes and analyzes all the data to identify:
Not at all.
While it’s especially valuable for high-value, high-importance relationships, any contract or partnership where outcomes matter can benefit. The approach scales to fit your needs.
Absolutely. Your responses are 100% confidential, and results, not attributed to a named person, are only shared within your participating team.
