Category Archives: Talent

Want a More Productive Supply Chain Worker? Take a Page from Tina Turner!

The difference between a productive supply chain worker and an unproductive one is staggering in today’s knowledge economy. As per this recent article in the McKinsey Quarterly on “boosting the productivity of knowledge workers”, raising the productivity of these workers, who constitute a large and growing share of the workforce in developed economies, represents a major opportunity for companies, as well as for countries with low birthrates that hope to maintain GDP growth. However, those companies that fail to keep up with their competitors will soon be swept aside in the battle for supremacy in the knowledge economy.

But knowledge work involves more diverse and amorphous tasks than do production or clerical positions and is thus hard to automate or streamline. Plus, the real returns are often the result of creativity and ingenuity that spark a new innovation — how do you boost that with a system or process? Typically, you don’t. So how do you increase the productivity of your knowledge workers? Simple, you increase the amount of time they have to spend on creativity, ingenuity, and innovation. And you do that by identifying their time-drains and taking them away.

According to McKinsey Research, knowledge workers spend half their time on interactions. Half their time! If they’re not getting what they need from these interactions, that’s up to half of their time wasted. So what can you do? You identify the productivity barriers — which can be physical, technical, social, cultural, contextual, and/or temporal — and you remove them.

If distance is a problem, you get people together when needed. If the technology isn’t sufficient for the types of global collaboration required by your team, you upgrade it. If the organizational modus operandi isn’t appropriate to the locale, you change it. If your people are having trouble understanding their counterparts across the globe, you give them some cultural training. If marketing can’t understand engineering and vice versa, you upgrade their technical skills. And if there truly isn’t enough time, you admit that fact and adjust the project scope and timelines to be more reasonable.

In other words, Tina Turner was right. If you want to succeed, you have to break through the barrier.

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E-I-E-I … E

Dalip Raheja of The Mpower Group recently ran a piece here on Sourcing Innovation on how Old MacDonald Was Right — It Is About E-I-E-I-O when it comes to successful supply chains. And when it comes to performance, he’s right — it’s all about Adoption, Execution, Implementation, Optimization, and Utilization.

But when it comes to attracting, retaining, and growing talent, you have to really focus on creating the optimal work environment. According to a recent piece in Industry week, when “hiring and retaining talent”, it’s all about the three E’s: Experience, Exposure, and Education because employees need

  • challenging assignments that allow them to develop new skills,
  • opportunities to expand their network inside and outside of the organization to continue learning, and
  • classes and mentoring to improve and gain new skills.

And the author is right. If your employees aren’t engaged, exposed, and enlightened, they won’t be energized by your organization. That means your stars will leave, and once high performers see their peers leaving, they won’t be very interested in joining.

However, it’s not the perfect recipe for an attractive environment as it misses two other key features of attractive work environments: Innovation and Inovlvement. Superstars want to innovate and build new products and solutions that make your customers’ lives better and they want to be involved in all aspects of the process from contemplation through design, development, and delivery. And they want to be informed when something happens good or bad (and asked for feedback). The don’t like a closed-door need-to-know environment and won’t stand for it. The want their E – I – E – I – E.

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Is India About to go through Classic Economic Growing Pains?

Reading Scott Anthony’s “Innovation Notes from India” over on the HBR blogs, I can’t help but noticing that India is about to face the growing pains that North America went through during the information technology revolution of the last few decades. Consider Scott’s points one-by-one:

India is a land of contrasts

Every revolution, from the telephone through television to the PC made North America a land of contrasts between the haves and the have nots. The culture of entire communities, cities, and counties, literally changed overnight. Take silicon valley for example. It was a new gold rush economy.

There are more people than jobs in India

That’s usually the case, and usually what propels a country to try anything to create jobs. And when unemployment hits a high, that’s what drives real innovation energy.

The innovation energy in India is tremendous

This is a key requirement for an innovation boom that is always accompanied by growing pains when a country tries to adapt to rapid change.

Indian companies might have it too easy

First-to-market companies always have it too easy during a new technology boom. As a result, they don’t innovate enough and that’s why the first-to-market companies are rarely the winners over the long term (and why what counts is being best-to-market).

There will be more SKS‘s in the coming years

Giving that developing economies are charging ahead, you can be quite sure there will be multiple micro-finance options in the years ahead as the rich try to take advantage of the boom and seize the opportunity, leading to more growing pains as the micro-financiers reach capacity when the companies they are financing require even more money to sustain their growth.

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FieldGlass is Determined To Take Off In the Tens

FieldGlass, which provides a unified platform for contingent workforce management, service provider management, and direct hires, is determined to tear forward through the tens, which also happen to correspond to its second decade of corporate existence. Founded in Chicago in 1999, it celebrated its tenth birthday with a bang by adding 33 new customers in 2009 before tearing into 2010 and adding over 30 new customers year-to-date to double its customer base in less than two years.

With localized support for sixty-three (63) countries and counting, over one third (33%) of the new customers it has added in the past year were from outside the US — and they expect this number to rise over time as they add more satellite offices in various countries and continue to add localized support for more countries. And like Coupa, which happens to be one of the many enterprise platforms their solution can peacefully exist with, they plan to keep up the fervant pace of customer acquisition for some time to come.

So how are they pulling this off? It’s a combination of

  • persistence like the little engine that could, they just won’t quit,
  • technology they have a solid platform which gets better every year,
  • limited competition Google might return over 100K hits for contingent workforce management, but only a few players (like IQ Navigator and Taleo) have platforms in the same class,
  • a truly global focus their localized support (which includes local laws, regulation, and policy) for 63 countries and counting is a differentiator, and
  • the economy since no one wants to hire direct full time employees anymore.

So what have they done since our last update last April (which followed the incredibly deep coverage brought to us by the Sourcing Maniacs in their 2008 vendor tour)? Two things of note: they finished flushing out their core BI suite and started working on Active Guidance. And while the latter is still in its infancy, it will be very useful when taken to the next level.

Their BI offering consists of three core capabilities:

  • intelligent benchmarkingacross equivalent job categories in equivalent locations,
  • drill down reporting which lets the user drill through the various spend cubes maintained by the application, and
  • visualization which presents the user with innovative graphs, comparative dashboards, and informative trends.

Most of the work has went into improving the benchmarks, to make sure the industry averages presented are for equivalent jobs in equivalent locales, and extending the visualizer, to try and find the best ways to present a lot of information in an easy to understand, but yet impactive, manner. In a few cases, they’ve really hit the mark. The first case is the country-based graphs which allow a user to see relative spending by state on a geographically correct map. These graphs take the concept of Shneiderman diagrams (or visual crosstabs) to a whole new level. The second case is the integrated trend graphs that allow you to simultaneously see the trends across contingent worker, service worker, and direct hire for any job position or category. This is important because whenever spending drops sharply in one category, it tends to increase significantly in another. (Can’t hire any new workers? Service workers. Can’t sign another long term contract with a service provider? Contingent workers. Contingent workers been here too long? New hires.) The third case is the comparative rate-range graphs which simultaneously present the average rate, the range, and the market average for a set of related positions — it makes it really to easy to see where the company is likely spending too much for its contingent and service labor.

However, what is really interesting is their new focus on “active guidance”. Having deep insight from meaningful benchmarks and comprehensive spend reports is one thing, but knowing what to do — and when to do it — is another. For an organization with thousands of contingent and service workers, this can be a challenge. To this end FieldGlass has launched new capabilities that is has bundled under the heading of “active guidance” with more in development. The three capabilities it has launched to date are:

  • Rate Guidanceusing the benchmark data and spending history, the platform will advise the user on the recommended rate range to associate with a contingent or service position,
  • FieldGlass Advisorbuilt on top of their alert functionality, the advisor will let a user know when a certain action should be taken (such as initiating a request for additional funds or to extend a current position), and
  • The Project Management Office Dashboarda quick summary into the past due, current, and forthcoming tasks that require the users attention with respect to payment and procurement, the dashboard is built on top of dozens of user configurable thresholds relating to processes, documents, and spend tracked by the system.

As FieldGlass continues its quest to automatically identify trends and associate them with suggested behaviors,this role-based feature should get quite interesting. The holy grail of performance analysis lies in the ability to take tactical data and derive meaningful strategy.

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The Board Room CPO

In addition to offering insights into planning horizons, supply chain strategy drivers, and keys to supply chain success, the recent report on “Supply Chain Strategy in the Board Room” by the Cranfield School of Management and Solving Efeso also discussed what it all meant for supply chain leaders of tomorrow. It’s conclusion was that the CPO of tomorrow needs to fit the following profile:

  • Strong Communicator: gravitas within Leadership teamin many companies, the sourcing / procurement / supply chain leader still doesn’t have a seat at the table, and even when she does, she often reports to the COO, CFO, or another CXO that’s not the CEO
  • Multi-Disciplinary: able to understand corporate & customer service strategywithout this insight, the CPO will never develop a supply chain strategy that complements and enforces the corporate strategy
  • Collaborative: works as a team player, does “external sensing”in modern terms, the CPO must have a high EQ IQ
  • Vision-Led: but practical and pragmaticthe CPO must be able to think long term, but able to adapt to short-term circumstances and fluctuations
  • Fact-Based: but able to deal with “ambiguity and ambition”the CPO must have a solid grasp of true analysis, and apply those skills whenever data are available, but also be able to fill in the gaps with wisdom and experience when data is sparse
  • Culturally-Intelligent: able to deal with a mix of global, regional, and local culture/leadership stylesmodern supply chains are global and they are going to stay that way

In other words, nothing that Sourcing Innovation and other top blogs haven’t been telling you for years, but it’s nice to see more support for the profile.

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