Category Archives: Event

What Risks Lurk in Your Supply Chain?

Do you know what risks are hiding in the dark and dreary basements of your supply chain? Are your suppliers using sweatshops that will ruin your image if they are discovered? Did your primary supplier build the only factory that can provide you that custom make chip on the ring of fire? Do floods threaten to wipe out supply routes over low-land sub-sea level plains? Does civil unrest threaten to close off borders? Is your primary carrier on the verge of financial bankruptcy? Are you sure? Really?

Risks in your supply chain are not like the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal — they’re worse. They don’t assume that just because you don’t see them coming that they can’t suddenly appear and swallow your organization whole. They are there, and for four out of every five companies, they are going to materialize over the next year and send shockwaves that reverberate and echo through the entire supply chain, causing millions of dollars of loss and damage along the way.

And, even worse, it seems that the risks are multiplying. A quick review of the eighth annual risk report from the World Economic Forum (Global Risks 2013) gives one the impression that, like memes, risks have learned to mate and multiply at a pace more rapid than ever thought possible. (Even LOLCats will soon be left in their wake if risk management continues to be ignored in 2/3rds of organizations.)

You need to be aware of sub-tier risks in your supply chain and, more importantly, you need to know how to assess them. If your supplier of corrugated cardboard goes out of business, that’s no big deal as there are dozens of corrugated cardboard suppliers. But if your custom control chip manufacturer can’t produce your chips because of a rare earth shortage, you need to know well before the shipment doesn’t arrive and you have to shut down an entire automotive production line.

For every relevant risk, you need to be able to get a grip on both the consequence of the materialization of the risk and the potential cost of the disruption it will create. There are likely more risks than you can enumerate, but there are only so many likely to happen, and only so many of those with dire consequence. As long as you can properly identify, assess, and develop mitigation plans for those with dire consequence, you can rest assured that, whatever happens, you will survive the storm. But if you can’t …

So how do you identify and assess sub-tier risks? We’ll get to that in a series of posts on visibility that will begin this summer, but if you want a leg up on your competition, I would suggest that you strongly consider the forthcoming webinar on Assessing Sub-tier Risks by Resilinc, who will be doing a deep dive into a proper process, the benefits it will produce for your organization, and the high cost of doing nothing in today’s global economy.

You can Register for the webinar, which will take place on June 19, 2013 @ 11am PDT / @ 3 pm EDT, at your earliest opportunity.

The webinar will be hosted by Reslinc’s founder, Bindiya Vakil, who has a Master’s of Engineering in Logistics from MIT with a thesis that addressed Design for Logistics, Planned Obsolescence, and Recycling long before Supply Management realized the importance thereof and the need for visibility in order to achieve these goals. (the doctor knows this first-hand as he has been preaching this, mainly on deaf ears, since the beginning of SI — see this early post on Design for Recycle from back in 2007) As a result of this work, and work since, Bindiya has found that visibility is not only key to long term supply chain viability, but also to resiliency in an age of rapid supply chain globalization and the risks that come with it. In this webinar, Bindiya will share what she, and Resilinc, have learned over the last decade about assessing, and managing, risks in your supply chain.

The First 100 Days

One week from today, at 11:00 a.m. GMT, in The Salle de Fete Private Dining Rooms in Kettners, on Romily Street in London, England, Bravo Solution is hosting the sixth and final instalment of their Real World Sourcing Series Expert Briefings on The First 100 Days of your tenure as a new CPO.

In this talk, the presenter, Guy Allen, will discuss the priorities of a new CPO against two very different contexts, one where there is a burning platform, requiring immediate action and the other where there is a little more time to plan and get it right. Both situations are difficult. In the first, the CEO/CFO is likely expecting rapid results, and in the second, the CEO/CFO is likely looking for a plan of action to deliver long-term, sustainable results. In either case, credibility with key stakeholders will be key.

A specialist in cost transformation and procurement, Guy Allen, now a managing partner at 4C Associates, has considerable first-hand experience as a senior Procurement professional at Fujitsu, Abbey, and GlaxoSmithKline.

This series is put together quite well. The last presentation was by Peter Smith of Spend Matters UK on “Measuring Procurement’s Performance” and included a great segment on 12 ways that buyers can falsify Procurement Savings (and get themselves in trouble if it’s ever discovered). The talk categorized spend into Opex vs. Capex and One-offs vs. Recurring and presented methodologies to accurately measure and report savings in acceptable, defensible ways.

If you’re in or around the London area, and are a new CPO, or a senior Director / VP vying for a CPO job, it would be worth checking this event out as the first 100 days is critical to your success as a CPO in an organization. In today’s tight economy, even if the C-Suite is not expecting rapid results, they are expecting rapid acclamation and signs that their faith in you will deliver results in the long run.

The Next Practices Xchange Is Only Two Weeks Away!

The Mpower Group‘s next Next Practices Xchange (NPX) is two weeks from tomorrow, Friday, November 4, which means that if you are a Supply Management VP or CPO that wants to discuss pressing issues relating to next practice identification and adoption, you should be on a plane in fourteen days time.

And yes, the doctor will be there. As most of my regular readers know, I’m not that big on conferences. Most of the regular conferences in this space have become, or have always been, fairly mediocre from a Supply Management improvement perspective as they are focussed on appealing to the lowest common denominator to maximize their potential audience, attendance, and $$$’s in their pockets. Just like the now-defunct Purchasing, the content has been watered down like a soda at the KWIK-E-MART to the point where you really don’t want to drink it if your goal is to be a leader in that top 20%, 10%, or 8% (however you want to define it). Given that SI’s goal is education and innovation, they just don’t fit.

However, there are still a few shining lights in the darkness, and the NPX has repeatedly proven itself to be one of those shining lights. In the same league of leading Supply Management consulting firms like Greybeard Advisors (led by Bob Rudzki who recently published Next Level Supply Management Excellence) and Archstone (who were recently acquired by The Hackett Group), The Mpower Group has been trying to take Supply Management into the teens in a big way by defining what the Next Level is and what Supply Management organizations need to do to get there. And while it is a work in progress, a number of the issues they have hit upon in the last couple of years are dead on.

For example, the second last NPX focussed on Training and Transition and the last one focussed on Value. In between, The MPower group has been defining a new methodology for improving performance based on AEIOU: Adoption, Execution, Implementation, Optimization, and Utilization — noting that many of the benefits of new processes and technologies go unrealized because of lack of adoption or proper execution.

For full details, check out the NPX website or contact Theodore Brown at 1-888-5-Mpower or theodoreb <at> thempowergroup <dot> com.

See you there.

Where Can CPOs Congregate?

CPOs need to network with their peers. As Steven Deverill of Langley Search and Selection points out in this recent CPO Agenda article on being “in with the in crowd”, the CPO position can be quite isolated, and networking with other CPOs is a source of support and information. It enables them to keep connected, be grounded, and hear what other organisations are doing.

Networking is one of the best ways that CPOS have for gaining ideas, benchmarking information and performance of your supply base and your team too. As Deverill points out, you can benchmark source plans or best practice and utilise industry specific and expert knowledge from your suppliers so you can get better deals. But there really aren’t that many places CPOs can go and be among their peers. SI only knows of a few industry events / groups dedicated to CPOs. And they don’t meet often. Some only once a year.

  • The Aberdeen Group CPO Summits
  • The ProcureCon CPO Roundtables
  • The CPO Agenda Executive Debates
  • The Procurement Leaders Forums
  • The CAPS Research International Executive Roundtables
  • The Mpower Group NPX Exchanges
  • The Tompkins Associates Supply Chain Consortiums

Now, CPOs can try to fill in the gap with online networking, but, as the article points out, there’s no substitute for face to face. And, at least in SIs view, CPOs should be taking a day at least quarterly to meet with their peers and get a good grip on the state of the global marketplace. So what’s a CPO to do. Are there any local organizations that cater specifically to CPOs? Or do CPOs have to belong to multiple organizations so they can attend a subset of the events above, throughout the year, to meet with their peers. Any thoughts?

Nicolas Hummer on The Next Practices Xchange

Today’s guest post is from Nicolas Hummer, Director of Client Relations for The MPower Group, who told us last year that Strategic Sourcing is Dead.

It’s spring time, and that means the (good) doctor is out on tour shaking hands, kissing babies and keeping his finger on the pulse of our dynamic community. Recently he was at The Hackett Group’s Best Practices Conference. As the doctor continues his summer tour, it’s only fitting that the next stop on his junket is the Next Practices Xchange, facilitated by The Mpower Group in Oak Brook, IL on June 9th.

The Next Practices Xchange is a member driven group focused on the advancement of ‘Next Practices‘. Membership is limited to Director level and above sourcing and supply chain executives and members choose the themes, dates and location for these events. These full day events are designed to facilitate intimate networking opportunities and truly strategic thinking away from the demands of daily executive life. The Next Practices Xchange is unique in that members participate in a number of facilitated workshops that augment keynote presentations. These workshops are designed to facilitate knowledge exchange between participants and provide take-aways and Next Practices that are applicable in an executive’s every-day life.

The upcoming meeting’s theme, From Cost To Value, was inspired by the immense interest that was generated on this topic on SourcingInnovation.com last summer (see Yup, It’s still dead, for example.). Since then we’ve observed the entire dialogue in our community as it has shifted to a fuller value-based conceptualization of Supply Chain Management in which TCO and Cost are only smaller components of a bigger picture. This event is designed to start taking those concepts away from the blogsphere and into the boardrooms, warehouses and supplier/client contracts of attendees’ organizations. Attendees this year are a mix of Sourcing and Supply Chain executives from top companies including BP, CNA Insurance, Diversey (an S.C. Johnson Company), Kraft, FMC Technologies, SunTrust Bank, Sears, Ventura Foods, and many others.

If you are a Director-level or above executive in a Sourcing or Supply Chain related function and would like more information on this advent please feel free to reach out to me at nicoh <at> thempowergroup <dot> com.

Thanks, Nick.