With some sadness, I am writing my last regular column for Logistics Management magazine. I wrote my first "Copacino on Strategy" column in December of 1986. Since then, I have tried to provide readers with meaningful insights and a view of leading-edge developments in logistics and supply chain management through 169 columns.

The discipline of supply chain management has come far in the nearly two decades since my first column. Here are a few of the important developments I've observed and written about during that time:

• We evolved from a focus on distribution to a focus on logistics and then on supply chain management.
• Supply chain management is now recognized as a competitive differentiator. Companies such as Wal-Mart, Dell, General Electric, and others have built their success largely on the back of supply chain excellence. My company's research has confirmed the correlation between supply chain mastery and financial success, finding that "Supply Chain Masters" earn a 7-percent to 26-percent market-cap premium.
• Supply chain performance has improved dramatically. Even as companies have globalized their sourcing and customer bases, they've reduced total supply chain costs, from 16 percent in 1981 to less than 10 percent of the U.S. GDP today.
• The new tools and technologies that became available to supply chain professionals expanded beyond all expectations. These include enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems; forecasting, demand planning, and supply chain planning tools; and customer-collaboration and design-collaboration tools. Others, such as event management software and radio frequency identification (RFID), made possible cross docking, flow distribution, and customer-direct delivery. And, of course, the development of the Internet as a powerful enabler of supply chain capabilities led this almost inconceivable two decades of advancement.
• Third-party logistics and other types of supply chain outsourcing have grown dramatically. We expect outsourcing will continue to expand in areas ranging from warehousing and transportation to inventory planning and management, fulfillment, purchasing, parts and service management, and full supply chain management.
• The evolution of process thinking, together with the shift to focusing on both internal integration of a company's functional activities and on external integration with suppliers and customers, may have been the most important development of the past 17 years. More than anything, those developments put supply chain management at the heart of a company's competitive advantage.

There have been some disappointments over the past 17 years. Perhaps the most disappointing has been the slowness or failure by too many companies to recognize the power of supply chain management in ensuring growth and business success. We are seeing some companies aggressively leveraging supply chain management capabilities while most others are still lagging behind in incorporating proven approaches and tools.

In closing, I would like to thank my editors at Logistics Management, including Toby Gooley and Frank Quinn, for their able collaboration. I would also like to thank my colleagues at Accenture for the opportunity to share and develop ideas with the best in the business, as well as my clients over the past two decades for the privilege of serving them and learning together.