Nineteen anti-trends from the hinterlands still remain. As much as we’d like this series to be nearing its end so that LOLCat can come out of hiding, this delirium has to stop. We have to shine the light on all these half-truths and lies and put an end to them once and for all. We will continue until each one is laid bare in the hopes that the outback futurists crawl back into the sand caves from once they sprang and leave us alone to push forward.

So why do so many historians keep pegging process convergence into supply management as a future trend? Besides their inability to remove the blinders, there are a few reasons, but among the top three are:

• Supply Management used to be office supplies and pushing manufacturing POs
  and the most sophisticated process was getting quotes from three office supplies vendor and selecting the lowest but
• Now its product, services, marketing and legal
  each with their own needs, own processes, own languages, and own regulations and
• Processes and talent haven’t kept up
  as change management and training wasn’t a priority as not much was needed when all you were doing was buying office supplies or cutting POs for a contact signed by another department

But, as we all know, it’s not that way anymore! So what does this mean for you?

Supply Management is the New Heart of the Organization
and needs to be structured and positioned as such.

All of the functions of the company are, to different degrees, becoming dependent on Supply Management. Supply Management must now be a leader in collaboration, supplier relationship management, and transition management, among other modern processes and technologies, that will be discussed in an upcoming series.

Back-Office and Front-Office are Converging

Its not just AP (Accounts Payable) merging with AR (Accounts Receivables) or Sales merging with Marketing, its the CRM (Customer Relationship Management) and SRM (Supplier Relationship Management) processes merging and Sales, Finance, and Supply Management getting an end-to-end view.

Transition Management to a new operational paradigm is required

And processes like ADKAR, as we discussed in our recent post #25 on More Stakeholder Collaboration, are going to be required. More on this in an upcoming series as well.