Installed base and its supply chain as P&L Center

I had promised to read only fiction this summer and enjoyed John Grisham and Jhumpa Lahiri before lapsing to old habits of reading non fiction, for fun. Anyway I again  picked up "Execution - the discipline of getting things done" by Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan.

I am glad I did because the structure of big consulting,business school academia  and big businesses had me really puzzled for a while, because strategy,operations,marketing and supply chain are different vertical "silos." Supply chain is clubbed with operations or in rare cases with distribution and logistics in marketing. For example, you can't  easily find a partner in a big consulting firm who  is responsible for  both downstream distribution and  upstream supply.

In any case coming back to Larry and Ram's book. Towards one of the later chapters they casually drop an example of how if you have an installed base ( be it aircraft supplied or the more modest office copier) the supply chain for the after-market should be seen as a P&L center for the future. They in fact do not use the term marketing at all. How insightful and integrative is that ? More on their HR views later .....