While many senior executives continue to talk about the "voice of the customer," few demonstrate their commitment to this concept by spending time with customers. Many continue to use their intuition or `golden gut' in their attempt to provide superior customer value. Unfortunately, `senior executive intuition' is rarely attuned to the needs of their customers. While the competitive environment continues to intensify, executives have cut back on the time devoted to customers just when it should be increasing. This article discusses the need for senior executives to spend time with customers and provides examples of the benefits that this approach will provide.

This paper focuses on the current trends in Supply Chains. With regard to this, new organizational architectures have begun to appear as a consequence of the strategic project pointing to the integration into a Supply Chain. This integration must be understood in the field of an Extended/Virtual Enterprise as an extension and improvement of external company management, which allows the basic/lows (physical and information), within a customer orientation. This is a study of the textile industry in Spain, which focuses on home-textile micro-cluster. The most common enterprise relationships are established with either the customer/supplier or it could be the other enterprises in a similar business. In this area, subcontracting is becoming increasingly important. This involves the specialization of the companies involved, which, in turn, creates a change in the organizational models of the sector. As a direct consequence, some companies are establishing alliances constituted as networks of collaborative companies, which act as nodes in a Virtual Enterprise (VE), each of which contribute the best part of its knowledge and experience. All operate directly with the customer giving the impression that the customer is dealing with a single company.

The supply chain is an approximation of inter-organizational relations, focusing on the successive value creation phases belonging to a set of enterprises organized vertically. In particular, it is a chain in which each component is a customer of the previous link and a supplier of the following link, and on each occasion, where one is the supplier, one must meet the requirements of the customer, who must clearly and precisely provide feedback about these. The supply chain can therefore, be considered as a network of facilities and distribution options, for developing the tasks of securing materials, for the transformation of materials into semi-finished and finished products, and for the distribution of these finished products to the end consumer. That is, the supply chain includes all the activities carried out from the movement of raw materials to the delivery of the finished product to the end consumer/user, and the customer service entailed in these services.

In this context, the SCM is a management system which establishes and controls this supply chain; a system which cannot follow traditional, authoritarian lines, but which must be based on the involvement and commitment of all the constituent parts of the supply chain, working towards a common project: the obtainment of end user satisfaction. The SCM must be a system, which includes all the constituent parts of the chain in their entire magnitude and manages these in their entirety, obtaining the complete involvement of all the constituent parts.