How to Easily Prioritize Your Decision Making Process

Prioritizing your supply chain can be difficult work. Your laundry list of upcoming concerns, To-Dos, and key tasks can conflict irritatingly. What comes first? What comes last? How can you make the most effective decisions possible?

Obviously, if you try to maximize each priority with every decision, you'll never get anywhere. The trick, then, is to have a theme or guiding principle your supply chain-- one that you can get the team behind. Once you have a landmark, everything should fall into place.

When making decisions and setting priorities for your supply chain or trucking logistics group, take a three-step approach:

• First, categorize your priorities according to how they help you get to your long-term vision.
• Then, line up the other priorities that can help you with your short term strategy.
• Finally, know how to determine where new action items fall in your priority list, and make sure your team can do so as well. New priorities arise every day in the little and big pictures, and it's key that everyone on your supply chain knows how to make the best decisions possible.

By having the context of what you want your supply chain's leading priority to be, when your decision makers are faced with a trade-off, they will always have a clear guiding principle to help them make make their decisions. Knowing the value to certain performance measures over others is a big help, and defining your unifying ideals will ultimately help your streamline and operationalize your strategy.