Five Steps to Value — Smoky Mountain Foods' Supply-Chain Transformation

A four-round, advanced supply-chain strategy simulation. You are the newly hired — and first-ever — VP of Supply Chain at Smoky Mountain Foods, Inc. (SMF), a Chattanooga, Tennessee branded-food manufacturer: US$1.25B revenue, 11% operating margin, four plants, six DCs, ~3,800 people, grown by acquisition into a patchwork of three ERP instances, no integrated S&OP, and plants that optimize locally. In your first week two things land: the largest customer (~22% of revenue, ~US$275M) issues a formal service-watch letter — OTIF has slipped to 89% against a required 96%, and a second strike within two quarters delists slow SKUs — and the board hands you a charter to build an integrated supply-chain strategy funded from a US$40M three-year budget, gate by gate. Following Dittmann's Supply Chain Transformation framework and the New Supply Chain Agenda, you (1) run a structured SWOT and name the single biggest threat to value — reframing 'fix operations' into 'build a strategy'; (2) choose a coherent few strategic priorities and align each to how SMF actually competes for its at-risk customer, resisting the urge to fix everything; (3) allocate the US$40M across a slate of initiatives — integrated S&OP/IBP, network/DC redesign, working-capital release, single ERP, plant automation, talent & org, a control tower — and sequence them across three phases for early, provable value under the board gate; and (4) present the Phase-1 gate to the board, committing measurable success tests (an OTIF target, a cash-released target, a date) and defending the sequencing. The math rewards an S&OP-first, service-led, self-funding roadmap with credible gate tests, and punishes the five classic errors: an ERP-first big bang that delivers zero service before the customer's second review and consumes the budget, funding everything and blowing the US$40M cap, chasing plant-cost reduction while service to the US$275M customer keeps slipping, buying assets while neglecting the talent and S&OP cadence that make them work, and presenting a roadmap with no measurable gate tests the board can govern. Final KPIs track OTIF (the service clock to the at-risk customer), Cash Released (US$M — the self-funding lever from the 94-day cash-to-cash cycle and US$60M+ excess inventory), Board Confidence (gate buy-in), and Budget Used against the US$40M cap.