Each and every year, and even throughout any given year, there are a flurry of executive or specific supply chain and procurement focused surveys and papers that are published by the big consultancies, analyst firms, and vendors. Their goal, accompanied by an often repeatable theme, is to inform readers as to existing and future procurement and supply chain challenges and what the most successful companies are doing to overcome such challenges.

Depending on the origination of such surveys, that being management consulting, systems integration or technology providers, there are usually technology enablement themes and perspectives with the technology of the day in the spotlight. As a result, these surveys and papers include the inevitable themes of the growing gap between industry leaders and laggards and the need to close such gaps.

And, of course, a closing summary that says the reader needs the technology of the day or the consulting services around the technology of the day that, lo and behold, no one can provide better than the publisher of the survey and the report on the survey.

These studies keep coming year after year because the core issues are still not being adequately addressed by the systems and services your organization is using. Since these core issues keep persisting year after year — sometimes exploding with a vengeance when an unexpected natural disaster or pandemic strikes, a war breaks out, or a fan of the Gilded Age believes that tariffs are the cure-all and starts global trade wars — the big consultancies, analyst firms, and vendors can keep writing about them.

So, we’re going to address these core issues that underlie your problems, explain what they are, help you understand why they keep coming back, and thereby give you some of the foundations to start attacking them. In each of the 10 articles that follow we’ll outline the (history of) the core problem, help you understand why it continues to persist, and give you at least one key insight to help you transition to the right mindset to start dealing with it appropriately.

As indicated in our last post, there are 10 barriers to success that keep cropping up in the surveys and studies again and again (and did so multiple times in the last 5 years). These are:

• Siloed Ways of Working/Outdated/Inefficient Processes ([00], [03], [04], [10], and [16])
• Category/Market Complexity/Saturation/Volatility ([00], [03], [09], [10], and [14])
• Lack of Funding/Budget ([00], [03], [10], [16], and [20])
• Org and/or Tech Execution Support Capability ([00], [10], [13], and [16])
• Quality/Supplier Reliability/Continuity ([02], [09], [10], and [19])
• Lead Times/Supplier/Carrier Issues &
  Supply Chain Visibility/Network Complexity ([02], [09], [13], and [14])
• Data Integration/Management/Analytics ([03], [10], [13], and [14])
• Talent Gap ([00], [03], [06], and [10])
• Competing Priorities/overcommitment/buy-in ([00], [10], and [20])
• Insufficient Business-Wide Support/Resistance to Change ([00], [03], and [10])

(See our last post on You Don’t Need To Read Another State of Procurement Study for the Next 5 Years! for the references and links to the 21 surveys, studies, and papers that were re-read and combed through in detail.)

These are the 10 we’ll discuss in upcoming posts! Stay tuned.