2020 is Less Than a Year Away. And we still haven’t crossed the supply chain plateau. Part II

In yesterday’s post, we referenced a post from six years ago where we commented on a piece by the Supply Chain Shaman who believed we had reached the supply chain plateau. And while we do not agree that the plateau has been reached, despite the extensive objective analysis of balance sheets, we certainly agreed that progress was, and still is, stalled.

We also referenced our post from a year ago today, where we asked will this be the year we traverse the supply chain plateau, that we believed the root of the issue was manpower capability. And we conjectured the root of the issue was a lack of education. But good information, good training, good consulting, good peer groups, and good courses — while still few and far between — have been available for years now but there has not been much improvement in the overall education level and manpower capability.

And while it’s true that 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, with the right foundational program in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics), the fundamentals of supply chain can be rather easily taught to intelligent and capable STEM grads.

So why aren’t they properly trained — especially when there are professionals out there more than capable of training them? And while supply is scarce, and they command top consulting dollar, when you think about the ROI a top performing team can deliver in just a few weeks (which can be in the millions), even a top dollar trainer can deliver the organization a ROI 10 to 50 times her price.

Well, because at the end of the day, management is not as well-intentioned as the Shaman or the doctor gave them credit for. Or, more accurately, their good intentions are more focussed on what’s good for them or their management peers today, not what’s best for the organization (and, at the end of the day, the shareholders) over the long-haul.

That’s why, year after year, when dollars get tight, the training budget is the first to get cut. Management believes that when times are tight, spending should be cut, and rushes to be the first to cut their budget to look good in the eyes of the CFO and CEO. Instead of investing today to take more off the bottom line tomorrow, they take the short-cut to look good today.

Instead of going over budget and buying a modern, 3rd generation, S2P platform, they cheap out and buy a first generation or low-cost, low-capability, second generation platform with limited capabilities that limits the eventual performance gains the system can provide to one that barely makes sense. A 3x ROI with an average 2% to 3% savings vs a 5X to 10X ROI with a 5% to 10% savings.

Instead of owning up to their own incompetence and own short-sightedness, they hire analysts and consultants to do market assessments and find ways to blame the market, the supply base, the systems, or even the staff instead of themselves.

In other words, we haven’t reached the plateau yet because less-than-well-intentioned management won’t do what is necessary to hire and elevate the organizational manpower to the skill levels necessary to scale the walls that surround the plateau and hide the even higher plateau blocked from view.

And while this is a dark and dreary view, what other reason could one give?