Author Archives: thedoctor

Are You Strange Enough? (Repost)

This post originally aired four years ago (on Nov 30, 2007) and is being reposted because it complements Monday’s post by Dalip Raheja on The Difficulty of Finding Qualified Supply Management Candidates very well. In Dalip’s post, he noted that you will never find a good candidate if you can’t define what qualified is. And, if you want a successful organization, qualified needs to capture the skills you want talent to possess — and these skills are highly dependent upon the outcomes that you want. In this classic Wharton article, which excerpts part of chapter four of Daniel M. Cable’s book, Change to Strange, we are told that to get the best results, companies have to build a workforce “that is extraordinary in a way that customers care about” and the only way to do this is to build your organization around measuring and gaming performance drivers . In particular, around metrics that define what you want to capture. These metrics will define the skills you want your candidates to possess, which will in turn define what qualified means, and, ultimately, help you find the right candidate. Plus, in today’s crazy economy, how can you possibly hope to win if you’re not a little strange?

Browsing through the Knowledge @ Wharton site, which is another one of those sites (like the Economist) that is just as important as the supply and spend management sites you visit every day, I stumbled upon an article published this summer that asked “If Your Workforce Is Strange Enough to Guarantee Competitive Advantage”. It’s a very good question.

The article excerpted part of Chapter four of Daniel M. Cable’s book, Change to Strange that notes what characterizes successful companies these days is a “strikingly different, obsessively focussed” workforce, one that — compared to competitors’ workforces — is “downright strange”. More specifically, to get the best results, companies have to build a workforce “that is extraordinary in a way that customers care about”.

In the excerpted chapter, the author argues that a successful organization is built around measuring and gaming performance drivers – and this is what results in a strange workforce. The development, measurement, and enactment of the performance drivers is what provides the required insight into what the organization is creating, and not creating, that is required to differentiate it from its competitors, attract customers, and, most importantly, win.

The process starts by identifying the outcome metrics that provide a valid reflection of what you think your organization exists to create. Then you find a way to make these metrics move in a way that your competitors are not willing or able to pursue. For example, if you’re a procurement outsourcing organization, you might decide that what customers value most is spend under management and spend put through the system. If this was the case, then you’d find a way to integrate best of breed on-demand SaaS technology into your offering so that not only could you put every purchase you make on behalf of the client through the system, your clients could also put every purchase they make against the contract through the system. Then, used meticulously, your customers would find over 95% of their spend against a contract you cut on their behalf would be in the system and that their spend under management goes up as a result. If your competitors think that the most important metric is total leverage-based purchasing power, you’re in a unique position if you’re right as to what customers want.

It’s also important to answer each of the following questions when you believe you have identified an outcome:

  • What produces the number – and what makes it go up or down?
  • What are the two or three most important beliefs our customers need to have about us relative to our competition to affect this outcome? How do we measure our progress toward our goal of having these beliefs accepted by the majority of our target market?
  • How can we influence the outcome in a way that is valuable, rare, and hard to imitate? What are we willing to do that the competition is not in order to drive this outcome?

For example, if you were a procurement outsourcing organization, you might come up with the following answers:

  • Spend through the system is calculated as total dollars on contracted items spent through the system divided by the total dollars spent on contracted items. It goes up when maverick spend is down, and down when maverick spend is up.
  • The two most important beliefs a customer has to have is that we mean what we say and we eat our own dog-food. We do all of our spend through the system. We measure our progress towards this goal by determining the percentage of outsourcing deals we are getting invited to bid on versus the total number of outsourcing deals that are currently happening in the marketplace.
  • We can adopt an open book policy on our own spend, and let prospective clients (under NDA) access the system and verify that our claims are valid – and this is something our competition might not be willing to do. We can also offer an on-demand spend analysis solution to our clients as part of our service offering so that they can calculate for themselves how much spend goes through the system, how much maverick spend is happening in their organization, and what commodities or categories we should be handling for them.

Thus, even though it might be a little too academic for your tastes (as the book was written by an academic who used a Business School as the example – ick!), the article had a very good point and asked some very good questions once you isolated the core of its message. If you want to be the best, it’s not enough to just work harder and more productively than everyone else … you have to be just a little bit different … and maybe even a little bit strange.

Can SaaS Solutions Improve Supply Chain Network Quality?

A recent article over on Supply & Demand Chain Executive on a holistic view of quality described the four steps to applying a cloud-based solution to establish a quality supply network. In this post, we’ll review the four steps presented and then discuss whether or not SaaS (Software as a Service), because “cloud” is undefined and irrelevant, can really improve your network quality.

The author is correct in that a number of trends (including a greater reliance on component suppliers, outsourcing of subassemblies and offshore manufacturing) are dramatically changing the supply base and challenging the ability of brand owners to manage their supply chains and ensure quality. And the author is also correct when he states that access to data is unpredictable across the supply chain and this is a problem. If all you get is a number of reports that are incomplete, inconsistent formats after the fact, that’s just not good enough — especially if you need to interpret the data in real time to take effective, corrective, actions.

And he’s also right in that, when outsourcing (to far-flung locales), intermittent inspections are not enough. A quality trend analysis, built from the continuous monitoring of quality, is required. However, retesting after you get a delivery does nothing to insure quality of supply — it only prevents defects from reaching the consumer. And if this results in a stock out six weeks before Christmas, this could be devastating.

That’s why a quality supply network, which insures quality before product leaves the manufacturer, is required. According to the author, this is achieved by:

  1. Capturing the Data
    Extract as much data as you can from suppliers’ manufacturing execution systems and/or spreadsheets into a common format.
  2. Uploading the Data
    Aggregate, synchronize, and retain the data on common servers where the supplier and brand owner have secure access.
  3. Analyzing the Data
    to gain insight into quality issues and trends (in real-time)
  4. Gathering Insight from the Data
    by way of an intelligent, multidimensional pattern recognition tool that identifies the data clusters where anomalies and issues are

And, at least according to the author, the best way to do this is a cloud-based solution because manufacturers do not need to make significant IT investments to build a quality network and you can quickly bring alternate manufacturers online and monitor their product quality, ensuring the results you need and minimizing the impact to delivery schedules.

This is true, but he is making / implying a couple of incorrect assumptions.

  • Cloud offers no advantages over SaaS
    and, furthermore, you don’t even need to have a true SaaS application or have it externally hosted! You could have a traditional web-based solution in your data centre. As long as suppliers can easily upload their data or provide you web access to their data feeds, it doesn’t matter if it’s cloud, SaaS, or just web-enabled. As long as everyone who needs the data can get it when, and how, they need it, problem solved.
  • You don’t need a multidimensional pattern recognition tool.
    All you need is a good data analysis tool and a smart analyst — because no tool will ever be smarter than the analyst driving it. As long as she can build the cubes she needs, create the appropriate multi-dimensional reports, and capture trends — she’ll spot the issues.

In short, SaaS doesn’t improve supply network quality — real-time data sharing and analysis improves supply network quality. A SaaS solution can enable this, but it’s not always necessary and not a complete solution in and of itself (as you will always need a smart brand owner and smart analyst driving the solution).

Want To Keep the Edge in Negotiations? Be Wary of Social Media

Earlier this year SI published a post on Common Negotiation Ploys that will be utilized by your sales counterparts every chance they get to try and gain the upper hand. We warned you that you had to be knowledgeable about each and every single one of these ploys because your sales counterparts, who get weeks of training before they’re even let out into the field in a supporting sales work, will do whatever they can to get the upper hand — and that’s the last thing you want.

In particular, you have to be wary of the

  • Getting to Know You,
  • Making an Impression, and
  • Mirroring

ploys because if you let the sales person become your friend, it will be a lot harder to stay impartial and bring your A-game, as you won’t want to beat him down and, more importantly, you’ll be a lot more likely to fall for the other ploys as you won’t want to believe that he’s trying to play you for the fool.

It used to be that a sales person had to show up, wine you and dine you to get to know you. But now, thanks to social media, he can learn more about you in a few hours of background research than a few months of relationship building, all thanks to online reputation monitoring tools that allow him to gather and review every single piece of data you share on social network sites. If you’re not careful on sites like Facebook and Twitter, the salesperson will know your favourite sport, your favorite team, your favorite wine, and your favorite restaurant and invite you out for an evening discussion of their upcoming product release which will just happen to be at your favorite restaurant, where your favorite wine will be waiting at the table when you arrive, followed by a trip to the ballpark to see your favorite team, at home, square off against their arch rivals. And that discussion will just happen to address how they are going to solve four of the five biggest problems you have, which the sales person will already know.

And while you might think this sounds great, the reality is that your barriers will be weakened because of the comfort level you feel at your favorite restaurant and favorite ball park and then shattered by a discussion of what your problems are. You’ll then believe that the salesperson represents a vendor who actually cares about you and who actually wants to solve your problems when, in fact, the vendor has no intention of changing its roadmap and the “solutions” being spun are not solutions at all but temporary band-aids with weak glue that fall off as soon as they get a little wet. But the story will be so nicely spun, and a discussion of release dates so carefully avoided, that you’ll think the vendor is spinning gold when, in fact, the vendor is melting lead.

And the vendor will know all this because he will have read every tweet you ever made that relates to an interest or like, consumed your Facebook profile and all common threads, monitored every LinkedIn group you were involved in, and reviewed any and every presentation or paper you shared online in the past two years. That’s why, as HP VP Scott McClellan found out earlier this year when he demonstrated the “hazard of sharing LinkedIn profiles”, you have to be careful what you post on-line. It’s not just your friends who will be following you, but your enemies. And they will be paying MUCH closer attention.

CBTM #1: The Difficulty of Finding Qualified Supply Management Candidates


Today’s guest post is from Dalip Raheja of The MPower Group, who declared that Strategic Sourcing is Dead last year, and who has returned to stir up a new hornet’s nest.

“Difficulty of Finding Qualified Supply Management Candidates” is the headline of a major research project by CAPS Research. I am glad that they are bringing renewed attention to this issue. My problem is that if you go back in the history of our profession, this issue has been in the top three issues of EVERY poll, research, think tank pronouncement, conference, etc. for close to two decades! My history goes back over three decades in the world of Supply Chain and I can remember in the early 90’s when this started to become a critical issue. And yet, here we are gathering insight yet again. We started this conversation by first defining who YOU are. Clearly not a scientific analysis but close enough for government work. We then drew some insights from the profile that was created.

Let me take the liberty of using the title to develop my call to action. Let’s start with DIFFICULTY. The question we need to ask ourselves is why are we dealing with difficulty? Clearly we are facing difficulty as a result of whatever we did or more importantly did not do in the past. We have never identified talent as a top priority in our organizations. And before you quickly pull out your strategic presentation to point to the slides, my first question will be to ask for a history of your training investment over the last five years. In fact, take a look at your total investment over the last five years in supporting your Talent strategy and compare it to other investments that your corporation has made. I bet it is nowhere close!!! How does your new hire program fare under that scrutiny? Has it been increasing over the last five years? Is the leadership in your Supply Chain organization specifically measured AND incented on the maximization of Talent? Are your people specifically measured AND incented on acquiring new competencies (not skills, not training . . . . . more on that later)? These are but some of the things that would explain the inclusion of the word DIFFICULTY in the research. At our last NPX conference and a recent Gartner event, numbers like 50, 100, 200, and 400 were being tossed as the current need of some major Global corporations in their Supply Chain organizations. I will let you digest those numbers for now and we will come back to them later. By the way, once you decide to invest in your Talent, there is an incredible amount of lead time that is required to make that happen. Those companies that are looking to hire 50 to 400 new people should have started 12 to 18 months ago.

If you are still defining FINDING as developing a job description and handing it off to your HR rep and waiting for the candidates to roll in … good luck! You need to step back and understand what your real needs are in terms of competencies for the roles that you are looking to fill. Because FINDING is also a function of what you define as QUALIFIED. You then need to develop an aggressive, comprehensive approach to attract and retain the right candidates. And unless you have thought your way through that entire life cycle, you will never resolve the issue. Let me illustrate with an actual case study. We were asked by the CFO of a major bank to help figure out why they were not able to attract any candidates to even show up at the campus job fairs for their New Hire program. We helped them realize that their brand name was not enough to attract candidates anymore. The real issues were that the prospects did not know what they wanted to do in banking yet and did not want to commit so early in their life. We redesigned the entire New Hire program to include structured six month rotations for the 1st two years (and their selections would be considered), a leadership member assigned as a formal mentor (and feedback provided by mentored to CFO on mentoring), internal job fairs by senior executives of various organizations in the bank, a “friend” assigned from the previous rotation “class”, formal group meetings where the entire “class” would get together to provide feedback, etc. And then we redesigned their marketing strategy (yes, you need to have a marketing strategy!). They had lines forming up at the campus job fairs!

As I mentioned in the last paragraph, ALL of these issues are intertwined and tied together (but I’m jumping ahead of myself). For example, if your definition of QUALIFIED does not really match your needs, you will always have DIFFICULTY FINDING candidates. The definition of QUALIFIED has to be based on the real needs of your “clients”. One of the constructs that has proven very powerful as an image that we use with our clients is to think of your organization as a consulting company. You would quickly realize that your ONLY asset that delivers value to your clients is your organizational competency and talent. Therefore, you must match your competencies to the needs of your clients, both for today and tomorrow. Otherwise, you will always be FINDING because developing organizational competency has a significant lead time.

Case in point: We just had a conversation with the CIO of a Fortune 20 client leading to the conclusion that his organizational competency was geared towards new solutions that his group had been rolling out very successfully. His problem was that his clients had not yet “adopted” the solutions yet … meaning that they had not been fully deployed. The Intended Consequences of the clients had not yet been realized. What he quickly realized was that he needed to immediately develop significant deployment competencies. Think of it as surveying your market to understand what their needs are going to be so that you can ensure that you have the right organizational competencies to deliver the value when your clients need it. Ideally, you should be a step ahead.

Finally, what do you define as a SUPPLY MANAGEMENT CANDIDATE? I guess we first need to decide what Supply Management is. Because if your definition is focused on the Supply Base and managing costs and lead times and someone else is looking at the entire value conversion process, then your SUPPLY MANAGEMENT CANDIDATE is going to look rather different from your competitor. If you think the role of Supply Management is to run an efficient process to ensure lowest cost, then you are probably not looking for candidates who can look upstream and downstream and start maximizing the entire system as opposed to the tail of the dog (supply base). If you think that Supply Management is all about the process of defining requirements and negotiating contracts, then you are probably don’t want candidates with all those so called soft skills (collaboration, teams, problem solving, etc.). Now you can see why we seem to have DIFFICULTY FINDING QUALIFIED SUPPLY MANAGEMENT CANDIDATES.

Stay tuned for our next post where we discuss Competency Based Talent Management (CBTM) as a platform for solving some of the issues we have raised here. If you are interested in getting involved or would like to follow this topic further, here are a series of critical activities coming up:

  • Release of the results of the Executive Forum we just facilitated at the IACCM Global Forum for Contracting & Commercial Excellence on Talent Management.
  • A major research project to not identify the problem one more time but to identify Next Practices to solve the problems.
  • A webinar with IACCM on CBTM.
  • A White Paper to focus on Next Practices in CBTM.

Please contact Crystal Jones at crystalj <at> thempowergroup <dot> com for more information.

To Green Your Supply Chain, Start with Packaging

Just about everything these days is still overpackaged. From the software DVD that comes in a box big enough to hold 20 to 50 of them to the laundry detergent that takes a box at least twice as large as necessary as it is not concentrated to even the bottle you’re drinking your water from, everything is overpackaged. The water bottle is a good case in point. You’re probably thinking this is probably the most compact packaging there is as, at least in this case, it’s usually 95% to 98% full, in addition to being light. However, in many cases, better technology can reduce the plastic required by half!

For example, as pointed out in this recent article on a “Chain Reaction” in Materials Management & Distribution, Nestle Waters Canada has been able to reduce the amount of plastic required to make a half-litre bottle from 20g to 9.1g! That just tells you how much overpackaging there is in the average densely packaged product with poorly designed packaging. And considering how wasteful packaging is to begin with (even if its recycled, as a lot of energy goes into producing packaging, and a lot more into recycling it), this is bad.

Furthermore, not only will you green your supply chain if you save packaging (as you will be using less raw materials and energy), but you’ll be saving a lot of money, as you will be able to fit more product on a truck, or ship the same amount of product with less fuel (as it will weigh less).