This page would not exist if the mastery of supply chain domain knowledge, and persistent application of that knowledge was sufficient to create results. 

There are a million tiny inputs about the context – the company, its products, its factories, its supply chain network, its suppliers, its customers, its transporters, its warehouse service providers and other players in the network – that are equally important. 

Miss a tiny detail, and you could easily miss the black swan – the big opportunity to turn the situation around to your advantage. 

Contextual know-how is of two types:

Horizontal, or lateral context – for example, what can we learn from the pricing algorithms of airlines industry, that we can apply in the shipping industry. 

Vertical, or deep context – for example, what makes our factory in Mexico turn the stock over 30 times a year when every other supply chain records stock turns of only 5-6 times a year. 

Used properly contextual information can form the basis of generating several useful hypotheses, as part of a valid bench-marking exercise.

On a broader scale, the journey towards results cannot take place in a vacuum. 

Almost all the contextual know-how will come from the people within your own organisation, with one big exception. Those environmental clues which only a fresh set of eyes can notice will get missed by anyone who is an insider. 

That is the reason why collaborative teamwork and mutual trust are so important for results. See this page to read more on that topic.