How Supply Chain Expertise Has Evolved

A recent article in the WSJ about the importance of supply chain functional expertise for women claims that “Supply chain management as a proving ground for senior leadership roles, including CEO, is increasingly evident, with high profile examples that include Apple Inc. CEO Tim Cook and Intel Corp. CEO Brian Krzanich.

One reason for this phenomenon is that supply chain leaders typically have integrated experience across very different and key functions in purchasing, manufacturing, engineering, strategy and logistics and often oversee new product launches and customer service. This unique set of functional skills is increasingly important to corporate competitiveness.”

The author, Beth Ford, Executive Vice President, Chief Supply Chain and Operations Officer of Land O’Lakes also notes how “the role itself has undergone a fairly dramatic transformation over the last several decades as the velocity of business has necessitated that supply chain functions operate in partnership with traditional business units in lieu of the old “service provider” model.

In fact, many of the most dynamic companies in the world including Amazon.com Inc., Intel, and Apple have built many of their competitive advantages around deeply integrated supply chain operations. In these companies, supply chain is as much about innovation as cost control.”

Related: SC24/7 Articles on “Supply Chain Innovation”

The role of supply chain management has been transformative for many companies because of the integrated approach it fosters. By eliminating silos and moving towards an end to end approach many companies have been able to improve their performance and take advantage of synergies across their supply chain. In addition, the wide introduction of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), supply chain planning, warehouse management and transportation systems has made it easier to manage and optimize various operations.

However, companies still struggle with gaps in their expectations of what their operations should deliver and the reality. They still have too much inventory in the wrong places, they do not have the data they need in order to make timely decisions and many of the measures on their dashboards look back instead of forward. Recently risk management has also been added to the mix and the exhaustive requirements of this process have made it hard to focus on the most critical elements.

While this cannot be fixed overnight, investing in the most important initiatives and gaining the most rewards is key to managing complex operations and mitigating risks. We recently outlined these in the a blog entitled the Top Five Opportunities in Your Supply Chain:

1. Conquering Supply Chain Complexity
2. Wrangling Data
3. Deploying Supply Chain Analytics
4. Improving Supply Chain Measurements
5. Developing Supply Chain Talent

One of the five opportunities that we mentioned was developing supply chain talent. Until the late 90s, logistics leaders had extensive hands on experience in transportation or warehousing. Supply chain management concepts emerged and started taking hold embracing logistics as part of a much larger process and requiring new skills.

Related: Forecasting a Supply Chain Talent “Perfect Storm”

Nowadays, the supply chain spans even more functions, typically starting from procurement and manufacturing and ending in multi-channel delivery to the customers. In addition, the knowledge around how supply chains work has expanded as well as the information technology and analytics capabilities.

Many companies, as mentioned in the WSJ article, recognize the important role of the supply chain in delivering their vision of customer value. This requires more diverse skills, exposure to the company’s end to end functions, knowledge of how other companies run their supply chains and understanding the use of data and analytics to improve operations. 

Therefore, these days, supply chain professionals are more likely to have an engineering degree and a Master’s that includes operations and supply chain training. This background helps them navigate extremely complex end to end operations and the need for analytics savvy.

Related: SCM World’s Top 10 Associations & Top 15 Universities for Supply Chain Management