Supply Chain Committee Charter (2025)

Defining “Supply Chain”

A supply chain is the network of all the individuals, organizations, resources, activities and technology involved in the lifecycle of a product. A supply chain encompasses everything from the delivery of source materials from the supplier to the manufacturer through to its eventual delivery to the end user, followed by returns and eventual disposal. Any assessment of a supply chain includes its economic, sustainability, and political impact, among other variables.

Current State

The book industry supply chain is made up of silos of information within different segments including publishers, manufacturers, wholesalers and distributors, libraries, retailers and industry partners. As a result, the constituencies have limited visibility into what’s happening across the supply chain, making it challenging to forecast supply and demand and use data to guide other business decisions.

The current supply chain was built in an era of physical products (print books, audiobooks on tape). It manages most aspects of print sales and distribution (ordering, receipt and return, and sales reporting) and supports orders between established trading partners. Legacy systems from the 1980s and 1990s don’t take advantage of new approaches, and enterprise solutions built with custom integrations have trouble adapting to new business models.

New use cases require development of one-off solutions. Interoperability across systems for things like sales reporting proves elusive. Repositories are proprietary or not employed, reducing transparency and industry-wide understanding. Opportunities exist to deliver better data going out (metadata, in particular) and coming back (inventory data, sales data by channel, real-time reporting). This committee seeks to identify and implement ways that we can redesign the supply chain to support transparency, product visibility, improved revenue, reduced costs, and the ability to adapt and grow.

In a December 2024 survey, committee members identified the primary challenges in the book industry supply chain as disruptions due to macroeconomic policies, tariffs, and increased regulatory costs; managing consumer expectations amidst inflation; maintaining quality and schedules while controlling costs; and addressing gaps in best practices and professional development.

Objectives

• Increase awareness about changes and challenges in the book industry supply chain through research, communications, and other actions.
• Explore the impact of developing longer-term partnerships on the efficiency and effectiveness of the book industry supply chain.
• Examine the opportunities and issues related to sustainability considerations affecting the U.S. market
• Promote the value of prevailing standards and best practices.
• Update or implement standards and best practices that are of value to multiple parts of the supply chain.

Stakeholder Impact/Benefits

• Standards that are used consistently across the supply chain reduce overall cost and increase transparency in reporting. As the nature of inventory and demand shifts, this transparency underpins the industry’s ability to track what is going on within and across channels. More widespread use of appropriate standards, including e-commerce packages, EDItX, XBITs, and interoperable file formats can reduce costs, increase flexibility managing reprints, and improve supply-chain effectiveness.
• Discussing emerging trends, including capacity, interoperability, transparency, sustainability, and piracy and counterfeiting, informs the community and provides a foundation for coordinated change. Communication and outreach also provide BISG with opportunities to demonstrate how its committee approach yields benefits across areas that in many other parts of the industry remain siloed.
• Creating a shared understanding of the current supply chain and the potential impact of changes promotes a shared understanding that allows the industry to focus on opportunities as well as issues and threats that it can address through enforcement, updates to standards, and potentially lobbying conducted by organizations like AAP.

Deliverables

• Participate in BISG’s efforts to “Transform Supply Chain Communication” with the goals of improving industry transparency, revenue, efficiency, and supply chain agility. Specific tasks are shown in the timeline, below.
• Offer a monthly “Lunch & Learn” series; each session will include a short presentation on an identified topic, followed by time for open discussion on topics that attendees bring to the table
• Oversee efforts of the Barcode Standards Working Group to describe options that publishers can use to create more dynamic pricing for physical goods
• Oversee work done by the Sustainability Working Group

Blockers

Because the supply chain committee works to solve problems that affect multiple segments of the publishing industry, its membership must reflect all of those segments. Representation in key areas (manufacturing, distribution, third-party sales) is limited and can be bolstered so that the committee can fully address issues.

Timeline