Recently, obstetrician Dr Liu Hongmei hit global headlines when she disclosed the story of a young couple who came to her after four years of intense attempt to get pregnant.

As it happens in these cases – when the wife could not get pregnant even after 4 years of marriage, the family pressure was piling on. Speculation and rumours abounded. The desperate couple were ready to try anything – including visiting a doctor.

That is when obstetrician Dr Liu Hongmei got to examine the couple. They spoke about their intense desire for a child. They spoke about their struggle with painful sex at a very high frequency. And, they spoke about the family pressure.

The events unfolded village in Bijjie city in the south-western Guizhou province.

When Dr Liu examined the wife, and was confused to find that she was still a virgin.

I know, now this story gets a bit hard to believe. I had the same reaction.

For those who want to verify it – here is the story. This is not the only place you can read it, you can also find it in many other places, including here, here, or here.

If you have not read the entire story, then you should do so before continuing.

Now coming to the main point of this blog post –

To all those people who think of supply chain as something vaguely to do with logistics or procurement, my message is this:

Exactitude is equally important in supply chains.

Technique is vital. While, in the case quoted above, it comes naturally to most people, it does not come naturally in case of  business transformations using supply chains.

Vague attempt in the general direction does not lead to success. Read the news story linked above again to know about all the futile pain the poor lady had to go through.

I wrote this blog post so that I can refer to it in future posts when writing about case studies I have seen over the last 22 years of supply chain transformation projects where companies confuse between supply chain and logistics, or between supply chain and procurement.