Category Archives: Knowledge Management

We Have Supply Management Problems. Where Will We Find Solutions?

Scandinavia.

That’s right, Scandinavia! Apparently.

According to the Global Creativity Index, put out by the Martin Prosperity Institute* and published in 2011, Sweden takes first place, Finland takes third place, Denmark takes fourth place, Norway takes eighth place, and the Netherlands takes tenth. The U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Singapore round out the top 10, creating North American and Australasian pockets of creativity, but most of it is centered in Scandinavia. (And that’s likely why Spend Matters is expanding into The Netherlands [spendmatters.nl]. They’re hoping to tap into that creativity that huge pocket of creativity.)

The report, which takes the three main classes of economic inputs — Technology, Talent, and Tolerance — attempts to go beyond simply ranking the 82 nations considered in the study and shift the classical focus on competitiveness and growth (which resulted in the pursuit of short term profits to the point where some of the world’s most advanced and affluent economies reached the brink of collapse) to creativity, prosperity, and well-being. As a result, in addition to the classical measures of economic growth and competitiveness, the research also takes into account broader measures of economic equality, human development, and subjective well being.

Classical economists, who followed in the footsteps of Adam Smith, may have believed that economic development came down to land, labour, and capital, but physical factors alone no longer determine progress in today’s modern, advanced economies, where factors like technology, innovation, knowledge, and human capital play much greater roles. And creativity underlies all of these factors. Also, as the report points out, everyone is potentially creative. But not everyone produces creativity. A lot of this depends on the tolerance of the culture in which they live. New ideas are generated most efficiently in places where different cognitive styles are tolerated — and different cognitive styles are linked to demographic diversity. It’s important to remember that, in today’s world, technology and talent are mobile and tend to flow to areas with the most tolerance.

What’s interesting to note is that leadership in any two measure is not enough to guarantee leadership across the board. Finland is first in Technology and talent, but 19th in tolerance, and thus lag Sweden by 3% in the index, putting them in third place. Canada, which is first in tolerance, is in seventh place because it’s eleventh in technology and seventeenth in talent. The United States maintains it’s second place position because it manages to maintain a ranking in each category that is top ten, giving it a narrow margin over third place Finland. Sweden is number one because it maintains the best overall balance, second in talent, fifth in technology, and seventh in tolerance (and since it maintains the best balance, people and technology are unlikely to flow out of the country).

So what does Scandinavia have to offer us? That’s a very good question. While SI knows there is a lot of innovation and creativity coming out of Europe in Supply Management, it has to admit it wasn’t expecting the creativity to be centered in Scandinavia. But it does explain why if you are seeking spherical supply solutions that you will succeed in the EU.

The Martin Prosperity Institute, directed by Richard Florida, author of Who’s Your City (referenced in SI’s series on Where Should Your Supply Management Organization Be Located), is the leading think-tank on the role of sub-national factors in global economic prosperity.

Should you “Mandarin-ize” Your Supply Chain?

After reading a recent post on the HBR Blog Network on how to unify your global company through a common language, which discussed Hiroshi Mikitani’s attempt to unify Rakuten, the third largest e-Marketplace company in the world (with a presence in the Americas, Europe, Asia, and Oceania) through a common language, this question surfaces.

In 2010, Mikitani, founder and CEO of Rakuten, decided that he was going to unify the global company through Englishnization — a commitment to make English the company’s official language. This commitment had three phases.

  1. All workers were required to take a 2-hour 200-question test (TOEIC) to assess their reading and listening comprehension of business English, and continue to take the test until they passed. (Failure to do so could result in demotion.)
  2. Outside help was brought in to coach employees on how to study and manage the process of learning English.
  3. English was made the language of meetings.

Why English? Practicality. Many of the most talented individuals in the industries important to Rakuten, such as technology and finance, already spoke English as a first or second language. Many of these individuals were educated in English-speaking institutions. Thirty percent of new hires in Rakuten are non-Japanese, with 50% of new engineer hires non-Japanese. The vast majority do not speak Japanese, but the vast majority do speak English. Their top engineers all over the world can communicate with their top engineers in Japan, who (now) speak English, with the average company TOEIC score having reached 737.3 out of a possible 990 (or 74.5%).

A common language will allow an organization to achieve a true unity of corporate purpose, because it will allow a unity of understanding. And then the organization will be able to manage and innovate as one with speed and precision and truly be global.

But should the language be English? For some multi-nationals, I am beginning to think it should be Mandarin. Despite the fact the cost of fuel keeps rising, that wages in China keep rising, and that supply chains have to adapt and respond faster and faster, outsourcing to China is still rapidly increasing. As per SourcingLine, China’s current outsourcing market is growing an estimated 30% annually, and many companies (like IBM) have relocated division or global headquarters to China to grow and strengthen their global business (and to try and get a dominant foothold in the market that consists of 1.3 Billion potential consumers).

In other words, these companies are sourcing from, managing in, and selling to China, where the dominant language is Mandarin – the language with the most native speakers in the world (that outnumber native English speakers almost 3 to 1). Plus, China is on the fast track to become the dominant economy in the world, an event that could happen in as little as three years (according to recent data from the International Monetary Fund, see the China Digital Times), and will most definitely happen in the next five to ten years if China’s economy keeps growing by leaps and bounds and America’s stays stagnant.

I will admit it will be much harder to Mandarin-ize your Supply Chain that it will be to English-ize, especially since Spanish, Portuguese, and French, which are other dominant global languages, use the same character set (A to Z) while Mandarin uses logograms known as hanzi (which are the counterparts to the Japanese kanji for those of you who speak Nihongo). Furthermore, there’s the special grammar rules for Germanic language speakers who are used to inflection, affixes that denote plurality and tense, and different rules for topic-prominence. However, if China is the heart of your Supply Chain, and thus the heart of your organization, it’s certainly worth considering!

Can We Harness the Wisdom of Crowds in Supply Chain Forecasting?

How Do We Harness the Wisdom of Crowds in Supply Chain Forecasting? A little over two years ago, I posed this question to you. I got a few responses, mostly private, who were thankful that I pointed out that you cannot just blindly follow the wisdom of just any old crowd, because expert judgements often demonstrate logically inconsistent results, but not a lot of advice on how we could successfully approach the task of integrating the wisdom that crowds could provide in our supply chain processes. The reason that we wanted to tackle this problem is because it is true that teams of forecasters often generate better results (and decisions) than individuals as long as the teams include a sufficient degree of diversity of information and perspectives.

But this is the caveat. The wisdom of crowds only holds if the crowd is large enough to contain the necessary diversity of information and perspectives in a statistically significant way. In other words, you will need a lot of people, and these people will need to be from diverse backgrounds and possess diverse skill-sets. But even this might not be enough in some situations.

As pointed out in this great blog post over on the World Future Society blogs by Thomas Frey from last August on The False Wisdom of Crowds, the decision between flying on a plane piloted by a single AI or the combined intelligence of 3,000 people is not as simple as you think. While it is true that the combined IQ and skill-set of 3,000 people is much greater than any AI on the planet, as you Next Generation Trekkies aware of the quick adaptability of the Borg will be quick to point out, it is also true that if all 3,000 of these people are farmers from the MidWest, it is likely the case that not one of them will know how to fly a plane! In contrast, the AI might be the best autopilot software in the industry, successfully used problem-free on tens of thousands of flights. The only way you’d beat that is if you had a collective of 3,000 of the best airline pilots in the industry. But the statistical likelihood of selecting that crowd from the global population is astronomical.

As Drew Curtis, founder of Fark.com, points out, “Crowds are dumb. The reality is that, while people are very good at knowing what they personally want, they are generally very bad at understanding the truths of the world around [them]. If you want proof, consider the examples given by Thomas and Drew, which include:

  • In the ’50’s, it was common knowledge that if a nuclear bomb went off in your city, you’d be safe if you simply learned to “duck and cover”.
  • Until 2007, it was a well-known fact that real-estate was a great investment where you would virtually never lose money.
  • Only once percent of Web comments have any value and the rest are just garbage.

In other words, diversity is not enough. You need expertise. And you need the right expertise. But as pointed out in SI’s post from 2010 and Thomas’ blog post, ‘social influence’ diminishes the range of opinions and tends to lead crowds in the direction chosen by the most respected and/or socially powerful individuals. So you have to gather data from a “blind crowd” that cannot see each other.

In other words, when you put it all together you need:

  • diversity, as addressed in our previous post,
  • privacy, as partially addressed in our previous post,
  • expertise, as demonstrated by Thomas’ blog, and
  • statistical significance, as not adequately addressed yet.

Taken together, these requirements pose a bit of a problem, which is made clear in Thomas’ post where he quotes a recent study by McKinsey and Company that calculated an immediate shortage in the US of almost 200,000 people with analytical expertise and 1.5 million managers and decision makers with the skills to understand and make decisions based on the analyses provided by the analytical experts. Overall, we’re starving for expertise in Supply Chain, as evidenced by the fact that less than 10% of companies truly employ advanced sourcing techniques! The average company just doesn’t have enough people to meet the diversity, expertise, and statistical significance required to guarantee that a crowd decision will be better than the decision of their “leading expert” in that area. And since most firms don’t want to share expertise, sourcing processes, or suppliers, especially where strategic or high-value categories are concerned, they’ve essentially cut-off external sources of expertise. The result: beyond non-strategic / low-value categories they would be willing to hand off to a GPO, their chances of truly harvesting the wisdom of crowds for many Supply Management processes are low, at best — and this leads us to wonder if we really can harness the wisdom of crowds in supply chain forecasting in practice.

New Thoughts? Comments? Criticisms?

Intesource – A Strong Sourcing Solution for Mid-Market Supply Management

When we last covered Intesource almost three years ago in 2010 in this post about intelligent sourcing through Intesource, we noted that this full-service offering eSourcing provider had a fully-featured e-Negotiation platform with SIM, document/contract management, and a relatively unique integration with Microsoft Sharepoint for those clients that ran on a Microsoft back-office and wanted to use these solutions to collaborative author documents and track changes.

Besides integration with the Microsoft platform, which is very common in the mid-market that can’t always afford, and often doesn’t need, the massive ERP solutions found in the Fortune 1000/Global 3000, other unique differentiators at the time were their massive template library for e-Negotiation events, integrated feeds from over 160 market exchanges for up-to-date raw material and commodity price information, and hands-on experience running tens of thousands of events. This put them in a restricted group of providers.

Since then, they have continued development work on the platform and added additional functionality that not only enhances the end-to-end strength of the platform, but narrows the group of competitors that can say the same. Three particular enhancements stand out — award analysis, market price centre, and mobile interfaces. We will describe each in turn.

Intesource has added an award optimization component that, while not true strategic sourcing decision optimization, is a very useful analytic component that will allow a buyer to determine a near-optimal, if not optimal, award for non-complex sourcing events. In the new component, buyers can create multiple award scenarios based on pre-defined rules, such as low-quote (which selects, for each item, the supplier with the lowest bid), low-group (which selects, for each group, the supplier with the total lowest cost for a group, or bucket, of item), or low program (which selects the supplier(s) with the lowest cost based upon a program specification, which could be to select suppliers with the highest quality, shortest-lead time, or MWBE specification where possible); or by hand-picking suppliers for each item and/or group. Then, the buyers can compare each scenario side-by-side to see how the different scenarios compare and what is gained for each price sacrifice.

Intesource’s award optimization module is not true optimization in that there is no underlying model, it doesn’t support cross-item / group rebate / discount bids, specification of capacity is currently limited to the event level and the specification of macro-qualitative constraints is limited, and you can’t yet re-run a scenario to see what would change if a supplier increased/decreased prices/quality/etc across the board by 5%, but as SI pointed out five years ago in it’s post on (Spend) Analytics vs. (Decision) Optimization, if your organization had a spend analysis product that allowed you to build a spend cube any time you wanted – on any data you wanted – on any dimensions you wanted – and then throw it away when you’re done then there would be nothing to stop you from building a cube on your RFP or Auction data, building cross tabs and tree maps, and then changing the cube to look at the data a different way. You’d find that you wouldn’t need optimization or a plethora of deterministic reports to find out who the lowest cost supplier was, who the highest quality supplier was, who the lowest cost supplier was relative to your quality metric, or any other query that can easily be answered by rank and cross-tab queries. And, as a result, you’d be able to solve many simple scenarios without optimization — and this is what this tool is attempting to do. Intesource realizes that many supply management organizations, especially in the mid-market, don’t have the advanced sourcing and modelling skills required to build complex optimization models and is endeavoring to build a tool appropriate to its user base. And while it’s not perfect, the reality is that, for an average (smaller) mid-size organization, continued development will allow Intesource to approach an 80% solution as many sourcing events and models of a (smaller) mid-size organization aren’t that complex and this type of solution will get such an organization much further than just e-Negotiation alone.  And on those 80% of events, the results will be near-optimal, if not optimal.

Intesource has centralized all of its raw material and commodity price feeds into a market price centre that integrates the feeds with additional graphing and reporting functionality, monitoring and alerts, and statistical modelling capabilities. In the market price center, users can view historical trends and price fluctuations, focus in on any particular period of time, extend trend projections into the future, monitor prices, cash, and futures contract specifications, set watch lists to monitor key categories, set alerts to immediately inform the user if a price threshold is reached or a price fluctuation exceeds a certain threshold, and even pull up all of the information associated with the exchange(s) a commodity or raw material is associated with.

Finally, like a few other providers, it is tackling mobile, but it is doing it in a smart way. The reality is that, while you might want mobile access because it sounds really cool, in practice it’s typically not very cool because you can’t do really do anything useful on a 3″ to 4″ screen, and what you can do is limited on even a 9″ to 10″ screen. Realizing that all you can really do is retrieve critical pricing and status information, Intesource is building a customized read-only interface that will allow you to determine current event status, bid information, and whether or not there is anything you need to to do or respond to when on the go.  And it’s working with its customer base to develop an appropriate interface that they can use effectively.

Other improvements since 2010 include an improved contract centre with more (user-defined) meta-data, search, and alert functionality; an improved vendor management (SIM) capability with embedded Q&A, enhanced search, attachment management, compliance, and watch-list capabilities; more milestone and scorecard management capabilities; an RFI question library with thousands of questions indexed by category, commodity, and other attributes (built on an analysis of 12 years worth of RFI data) to allow for quick definition of templates and RFIs; and a roles-based public event calendar. Intesource is constantly developing new modules, functions, and features with a roadmap largely driven by its user community as all requests are reviewed quarterly by an advisory committee and prioritized based upon overall demand and usefulness.

Intesource is a solid player in the eSourcing mid-market that should be included in the candidate pool by any company that does most of its business in North America.

Supply Chain Syllabi Suck – But Should You Be Designing One?

It’s an interesting question, and one I have to ask after coming across Adrian Gonzalez’ recent post over on Logistics Viewpoints on A Supply Chain Course Designed by You. While I agree that the average life of a supply chain text is two to three years where case studies are concerned (but not where core principles are concerned as some of the classics by Robert Rudzki and Dick Locke are still holding up eight and seventeen years later), I don’t necessarily agree that syllabi go out of date that fast, or that you are the best person to be designing one.

I also agree that trends do develop every day, that most traditional syllabi are about two decades out of date, and that an instructor should update the syllabus as required before every course delivery, but I’m not sure it should be based solely on student requests. While an instructor should attempt to address as many student questions as possible, they should be restricted to the subject matter of the course. More specifically, if the course is on sourcing and procurement technology, the instructor should not go off on a tangent on proper multi-tier supply network design, which should be a different course.

However, the real reasons that an instructor should not design an entirely student driven course are the following:

  1. Every student will likely have a different problem that he or she believes he or she needs addressed that is
  2. based on a different understanding of what proper supply management for (what) a proper supply chain (is) and
  3. that problem is not necessarily the root problem or representative of the core theory, and practical solutions, that need to be addressed.

If the student knew what she needed to learn, she would not be a student, she would, at the very least, be a mentor, if not a teacher herself. For those of you with a martial arts background, you would not be deshi, you would be yudansha or sensei yourselves. Because you have not gone before, you don’t know the way you need to go. That’s why you need a teacher, a guide, to show you the way and teach you the basics you need to know in a cohesive, relevant framework appropriate to the course. A well-designed course by an instructor who is trained in the theory and experienced in the practice will weave together the foundations with relevant examples in such a way that the student will learn to identify what the root problems are, what solutions might work, and what questions should be raised, and addressed by the instructor — who will have no problems weaving the answers in, on the fly, to the lectures at hand.

In other words, I don’t think the methodology proposed by Adrian is necessarily the right process for designing a course, but I do think it’s a great process for tweaking a course, and, more so, for determining what course(s) a student should be taking. In other words, an organization or institution offering Supply Management and Supply Chain training should, before allowing students to enrol in a course,

  • request that the students fill out a questionaire that outlines their key questions and topics of interest a month or so in advance,
  • analyze the responses and determine potential best fits between the students and the courses being considered, and
  • create pre-course discussion groups, facilitated by the likely instructor, a few weeks in advance and invite the students to participate in the group to gather consensus on key topics, issues, and questions that should be addressed — and figure out if the course is really for them.

Then the provider can let students register, knowing that there will be good fits, and the instructor can tweak the course to be as relevant as possible to the needs and interest of the students, using the most relevant case studies and focussing on the secondary topics of common interest once the core material has been covered.

Of course this is just the doctor‘s opinion (and his only real qualification for this argument is that he has been an Assistant Professor in Academia and an Industry Trainer), and it will be interesting to see the results if 30 (thirty) practitioners take Mr. Gonzalez up on his offer.