Monthly Archives: November 2011

Talent Really Can Transform Your Organization

In yesterday’s post, we discussed the NPX keynote by Don Wirth, VP Global Operations Supply Chain and Excellence of DuPont, on DuPont’s Journey to Supply Chain Excellence and how a key to success was DuPont talent. We also said that DuPont is a company that did more than just give their talent lip service and put their corporate money where their corporate mouth was and this is a key to their recent success (which saw a year over year EPS growth of 32% last quarter) and their plans to cut 3.7 Billion in cost from their supply chain.

How did they do it? When the economy was tanking in late 2008 and early 2009 and everyone was cutting jobs left, right, and center, instead of cutting their global workforce 5% to 10% with all their peers, which was the original gut feel reaction of some executives and board members, they took a step back and said “the market will come back like it always does and the best way to recover is to be ready and more competitive when it does“. And they realized that the best way to be ready was to have people who could capitalize on the opportunity. By capitalizing, they decided that they needed people who could deliver the necessary innovation while keeping supply chain costs down as that is the key to continued success in up or down economies.

So they created a center of supply chain excellence and took people from across the company who would have otherwise been laid off from under-performing divisions and trained them. And trained them. And trained them some more on supply chain best practices — lean, kaizen, negotiation, contract management, and other areas of critical impact. Then they sent them back into the business units with new skills and knowledge to guide unit operations and manage the supply chains with guidance from the center of excellence. And then the cost reductions started to appear from across the board.

From there, they modified their Dupont Production System (DPS) methodology to include best-in-class supply chain operations to provide the highest customer service with the lowest total cost of ownership by increasing overall supply chain resilience. And then they focussed on plant operations, supply chain design, and supply chain optimization and identified almost 3.7 Billion in cost reduction opportunities through improved operations. And now development is a key part of their mandate and a continued focus. And it’s for the best.

Three Keys To Success in Today’s Competitive Supply Chain Landscape

The other keynote at this fall’s NPX was by Don Wirth, VP Global Operations Supply Chain and Excellence of DuPont who did a presentation on DuPont’s Journey to Supply Chain Excellence. Dupont, which expects to save almost 3.7 Billion dollars at the culmination of their journey through improved plant operations, supply chain network design, and supply chain optimization, will slash its overall supply chain costs across the board by about 10%. (And its efforts are making an impact. It just delivered strong EPS growth on 32% higher sales for third quarter 2011.)

How is it going to do it? Innovation, differentiation, productivity, and talent are key success requirements. In particular, it plans to align the following strategic themes:

  • Innovation & Customer Focus,
  • Differential Business Management, and
  • Productivity & Continuous Improvement

with the following growth trends (and the importance of trends was discussed in SI’s posts on minitrends and megatrends):

  • increased need for food production,
  • decreased dependence on fossil fuels,
  • environmental protection, and
  • emerging markets.

This is great strategy for any supply management organization. Align with forthcoming needs and be better prepared for the market shifts that tend to come faster than expected. So how does it plan to align?
By beginning with management practices. Metrics and incentives are revised to be consistent and aligned with goals. Risk management is organization wide. Governance and structure supports center of excellence operations. Then it leverages scale and skill. It starts with standardization and simplification. It puts experts in charge of the supply chain. Best Practices are institutionalized. Finally, it builds culture and capabilities by treating talent as an enterprise asset.

Dupont engages its workforce in its entirety. The collective power is in the group and the team, and getting the most we can out of
our operations. These words are straight from the mouth of the CEO, who puts the company’s focus where her mouth is. How? That’s the subject of tomorrow’s post.

Winning the Talent War – Start With A Resource Strategy

In yesterday’s post, that mentioned that the talent war has just begun, we discussed Don Klock’s keynote at last week’s NPX workshop, put on by the The Mpower Group. In his keynote, Don, a Senior Global Procurement / Supply Chain Executive with over 30 years of experience with multiple major multinationals who is now with the Rutgers Business School, Don noted that, as a result of the severe skilled talent shortage,

if you don’t have a Resource Strategy to build your talent
pool, you better develop one.

Why? Because, to put it in the colourful euphemism us North Americans understand so well, you’ll be up sh*t creek without a paddle otherwise. And while Seth Green, Matthew Lillard, and Dax Shepard might have parlayed their situation into a 69 Million gross for Paramount, you won’t be so lucky.

Fortunately, a resource strategy isn’t that hard. A simple one consists of:

  • an internal skills assessment
    to define your skills (& talent) gap
  • a training and development program
    to take the both the resources you have, and the resources you bring in, to the next level
  • a recruiting plan
    to get that talent

Or course, the recruiting plan can be quit an exercise. After all, where do you look? Internally? Externally? Do you use a recruiting firm? Do you use a temporary staffing agency to keep the canoe afloat in the interim? Do you rotate your top performers through temporary assignments to make sure all critical functions, and tasks, get addressed? Do you just outsource? And if you look external, where? Universities? Industry Associations? Job Boards? Your competitors? The answer is typically — as Don notes — all of the above. You need talent, and you need to get it wherever its, whenever you can, through any means necessary.

This will obviously take some work.

  1. First, you will have to identify how you will relate to your job pool.
    These days, talent wants challenging work, good benefits, life/work balance, advancement opportunities, the right culture, and the right management in addition to a good salary. And, in fact, chances are culture, life/work balance, and organizational mission are more important to them. For the Millennials, a lack of focus on environmental stewardship is unthinkable and a kiss-of-death to your organizational future.
  2. Then you have to get that message out there.
    You’ll need a great job description, a great corporate message, and a great communicator leading the charge. And this person will have to connect to your talent wherever they are — job fairs, industry events, and on-line social networks like LinkedIn.
  3. Finally, you have to rope them in during the interview process.
    An interview is a two-way street now. They are interviewing you as critically as you are interviewing them, if not more so. Not only is their unemployment rate as skilled, college-educated talent, approaching an all-time low, but they know that, in many industries, there are not enough people to meet the demand and that they have the power. You will need to address all of their concerns, and (honestly) demonstrate that your organization is not only paying better but also providing a better work/life balance while providing challenging work and advancement opportunities, and that they will shape the path of the organization going forward. (Of course, if all this isn’t true, then your organization has a big problem as it’s not going to attract much talent until it is.)

Of course, if your organization does all this right it will be one of the few in a position to find, attract, and retain talented resources, which will soon be the supply chain’s number one talent. Almost 25% of the North American workforce is now eligible for (early) retirement. The only reason they are hanging on is the down economy. When it bounces back, they’re gone, and you’re down another 25% (or more) if you’re not ready. So get ready.

The Talent War Has Just Begun!

This was a central theme of the NPX keynote by Don Klock, Clinical Associate Professor of Supply Chain Management & Marketing Science at Rutgers Business School, a Senior Global Procurement / Supply Chain Executive with over 30 years of experience with multiple major multinationals, including Colgate Palmolive.

Even though unemployment is still near a fifty-five (55) year plus all time high, which was around 10.5% back in the early 80s, it’s becoming harder and harder to fill vacant positions due to the shift in the North American economy which resulted in most Blue Collar jobs being outsourced and the need for more highly skilled white collar workers than the North American economy has traditionally produced. Couple this with declining birth rates in the developed and developing world (even though the global population just hit 7 Billion) and a relatively constant number of University graduates over the last 5 years in North America (approximately 3 Million a year in the US, which is less than 1% of the US population attaining a University degree each year), and the problem starts to take shape. There’s not enough blue collar jobs for those without college degrees, and more jobs that require college degrees and experience than there are college graduates to fill them. When you break down the unemployment rate, as this article in MarketWatch on the “white-collar recession, blue-collar depression” did last year, when the official overall U.S. unemployment rate was 9.6%, and the “underemployment” rate topped 17%, you find that unemployment is less than 4.5% among college graduates vs about 10.8% for those with a high-school diploma and 14.3% for those without one.

This is largely due to the loss of U.S. manufacturing jobs, which have decreased 40% over the last 20 years. The jobs that remain are outsourcing and supply chain management, which involve a lot of skill, experience, and education — which a large percentage of the U.S. population does not have. That’s why we have large multinationals with 500 jobs and no one to fill them!

That’s why, as Don says, the demand for suitably qualified procurement professionals is on the rise and the job of retention and recruiting talent is much more difficult than it has been historically. And that’s why, if your organization is to survive the supply chain talent war, it needs a supply chain resource strategy. Without one, your organization will be left in the dust as your competitors acquire the limited supply of talent that is currently available.

So what should you do? We’ll discuss Don’s suggestion in our next post on the talent gap.

How to Be a Customer of Choice?

CPO Agenda recently ran an article on “how to be a customer of choice” that merits some thought. If supply is limited, or a supplier innovation could shift the balance of power in the marketplace, you want to make sure that your organization is first in line to get it. And, since the size of your wallet, while still a hugely important element, may not in isolation be sufficient to guarantee your company receives preferential access to scarce resources, latest innovations or the best people, your organization wants to be a customer of choice. So how do you do that?

Becoming a customer-of-choice may not be as easy as one thinks because Key Account Management (KAM) is much more widely established and practiced than SRM, which means that, in terms of account management, your suppliers have a leg up on you. Plus, you can bet the average sales organization puts a lot more effort and investment into account management than a supply management organization does today.

According to the article, which quotes KAM experts Malcolm McDonald and Diana Woodburn, there are three (3) main elements that companies use to select key accounts (customers of choice):

  • Financial Outcomes
    past, present, and potential future income streams as well as “wallet share” (on the basis it can cost up to five times more to capture a new customer than grow a relationship with the existing one) over the next three years
  • Customer Needs
    and how well the supplier’s visions and objectives are aligned with their needs
  • Customer Attributes
    factors and behaviours that signal to the supplier whether “trusted partner” status is a reality

However, in some cases, key account status, which should be reserved for only a handful of accounts (15-35 is considered optimal by some), does not, by itself, guarantee preferential treatment. In practice, only a third of key accounts, on average, are given access to cost and productivity improvement resources, access to reliable sources of critical materials/services, and breakthrough innovation ideas.

Based on this, the authors proposes the following definition for customer of choice:

a company that, through its practices and behaviours, consistently positions itself to receive preferential access to resources, ideas and innovations from its key suppliers that give it a competitive advantage

And the best way to become one, according to the author, is to see things from the supplier’s perspective. The typical pain points of a supplier are:

  1. Willingness to Engage
    suppliers want a customer open to external ideas and willing to listen to what they say
  2. Information Sharing & Communications
    lack of openness makes a supplier worried about customer commitment and affects allocation of resources
  3. Getting Things Done
    suppliers want a customer that will make decisions and implement them
  4. Approach to Business
    is the supplier treated fair and respectfully by the customer and can it expect to be treated so in the future
  5. Paying the Bills
    customers do not like late payments or unfair payment processes

And these are all good points. In fact, as far as I can tell, all that is missing is the following:

6. Long Term Commitment
All of the above is a good start, but what a supplier really wants from a customer of choice is a long term relationship that is likely to be profitable.