Will this be the year we traverse the supply chain plateau? Part II

In yesterday’s post, we noted that five years ago we covered a piece by the Supply Chain Shaman who believed we had reached the supply chain plateau. And while SI did not agree, SI agreed that progress had completely stalled. And SI believed that the root cause of the issue was manpower capability. Precisely, the fact that most executives do not understand the supply chain from a holistic perspective, treating each step as its own function (and disassociating NPD/Design from Sourcing (a manufactured product) from Logistics and Distribution, when they all have to be examine and managed as part of an integrated supply chain. And the fact that neither do the function managers. Moreover, these function managers often do not even understand the best practices associated with their job.

And SI believed the root cause of this was a lack of education — most Supply Chain / Supply Management / Sourcing / Procurement / etc. managers don’t leave college or university with a solid supply chain background, as few institutions offer such programs, and they haven’t been properly trained. Add this to the fact that year over year training budgets are slashed and leaders are run ragged fighting fires and dealing with tactical issues instead of being given time to focus on long-term strategy, how the supply chain works, and how it should work for optimal performance and optimal corporate gain.

Now, it’s true that the education issue hasn’t improved much in the last few years, but what has improved is the technology to provide executives and function managers both with a more holistic view and guidance as to directions they can take. Modern cognitive technologies backed by machine learning and automated reasoning, which can process millions of data records in near real time, identify trends, identify outliers, identify normal behaviour, identify typical responses, and so on, can present executives and managers with holistic views that let them understand not only what their options are, but what impact it has on the immediate problem and the supply chain as a whole. Ripple effects through the organization and the chain can be predicted and an informed decision made with the known impacts in mind.

Companies will know not only the impact of a delayed payment, but the benefit of an early payment as well as the trade-offs between JIT delivery and maintaining raw material inventory or the benefits of combining volume with a single supplier for more cost-effective shipments from a closer supplier. And so on.

If we can’t fix the education, at least we can fix the holistic understanding of the impact of a decision. And while we don’t have systems for all situations yet, you can bet they are in development. Maybe 2020 will indeed bring 2020 vision to some supply chain areas!