Category Archives: Talent

First out of the Gate: Bob Ferrari

Everytime I launch a new cross-blog series, I always wonder who will be first out of the starting gate, trying to be the first to capture the readers’ minds and hearts. This time it was Bob Ferrari of Supply Chain Matters and The Ferrari Group who posted his Seven Grand Challenges for Supply Chain Management yesterday.

In his first post, he lays out his seven challenges and tackles the first three head on, promising us two more posts on the last two challenges before the week is up. Bob’s Seven Grand Challenges are:

  1. Ubiquity of Portable Computing Leading to Real Time Sensory Networks
  2. True Supply Chain Business Intelligence and Decision Making Tools
  3. Managing the Explosion of Data and Information Needs in Global Based Value Chains
  4. Managing Supply Chain Risk Management on a Global Basis
  5. Who Assumes Ownership for the Extended Supply Chain?
  6. Articulating the Value and Consequences of Supply Chain Directly to the C-Suite
  7. A Global Shortage of Talent and Skills in Supply Chain Management

I really like #2, because it meshes with my seventh challenge of Opportunity Analysis. Today’s supply chains are filled with untapped opportunities, and you’re going to need good business intelligence and decision making tools to find them. And we’re definitely on the same page with #4! Risk is everywhere, and supply chain disruptions are still rising rapidly, due, primarily, to poorly managed, if not unmanaged, risk.

I’m not convinced of #1, #3, and #5 though.

1. I can certainly see the value of Real-Time Sensory Networks and systems self-updating as soon as product is detected in area B when it was in area A, but I don’t think this is going to add that much efficiency, especially if we had integrated physical, financial, and information-based supply chains where all it took to accept a complete shipment was logging into the shared system and checking “received”. Plus, I don’t want to see us become over-dependent on technology. What happens on that fateful day, which always happens eventually, when it fails and no one knows how to do it manually?

3. I believe that managing the data explosion is an IT challenge, because it goes well beyond just supply chain and supply chain systems. Data explosion is everywhere, and it’s IT’s job to build the databases, marts, and warehouses we need to manage it. It’s Supply Chain’s job to select from the best systems out there. Bob makes some great points in his post, but I’m not sold.

5. I think this is a great question to ask, but it’s not really a challenge, because, in my view, it’s trivial to answer. The CEO. Today, your company is your supply chain. Sure you have a CSCO who’s job is to manage the chain on a daily basis, but the buck should ultimately stop with the CEO. Nonetheless, I’m waiting to see what Bob has to say on this one …

And #’s 6 and 7 certainly have me thinking!

If we go back to the Top Three challenge, David Bush of e-Sourcing Forum and Iasta proclaimed that the top-three challenges of supply chain today were Adoption, Adoption, Adoption. This is a cry I’m hearing from e-Sourcing and e-Procurement companies across the board. And even though this is the perfect economy for those providers, because e-Sourcing and e-Procurement software is about the only way to reign in your spending during the deflationary/slowdown/recession economy we’ve been in for a while now, the cry only seems to be getting louder. Maybe it is a longer term challenge than I give it credit for. I’m anxious to see what Bob offers up on this one!

I’m definitely on board with #7! If you check out the talent category here on SI, you’ll see that I’ve essentially been whining about this problem since day one! It’s a huge challenge right now, and it’s going to be for at least the next five years. However, history tells us that talent shortages tend to resolve themselves over a ten to fifteen year window. Once demand gets high enough, and stays high enough for a few years, students, anxious to have a job when they graduate college / university, see that as a good career choice and take educational paths that will prepare them for that careeer. Young professionals ready for a career change go “back to school” (through night courses, part time programs, private programs, etc.), prepare themselves for that industry, and move on in. Simultaneously, the industry, desperately short on talent and needing to get through the day, re-engineers its processes, automates as many tactical functions as it can, and learns to do more with less. After ten to fifteen years, the talent shortage drops to a manageable level. And I’m looking at a twenty to twenty-five year window with these challenges. It’s definitely a major challenge … but is it important enough to knock, say, GHG Tracking and Reduction off of my list? I don’t know. But I’m definitely anxious to see what Bob has to say on this one too!

The Importance of the Job Description to your Talent Management Strategy

A few months ago I brought you a post on Purchasing Certification as a Savings Strategy that described the significant ROI that a company can expect to obtain by getting their entire purchasing department trained and certified. A department-wide certification ensures consistent processes and results across your purchasing team and insures that your overall performance, and, more importantly, whether or not you meet you savings targets, does not rely solely on a handful of star performers. Although it’s true that a star purchaser will often save three, five, or even ten times as much as an average purchaser, just like your star salesperson will often sell three, five, or even ten times as much as your average performer, betting the company on a single individual is akin to betting on a horse to win at the track. Not a strategy I’d bet my company on.

The post served as another example of how critical talent management is to today’s company, and today’s purchasing / procurement / supply management department in particular with commodity, raw material, and energy prices rising across the board in a stagnant economy where even holding prices steady might not be enough to keep a company in the black. Talent management, which starts with the acquisition process and extends to the eventual retirement of your talent, is a complicated topic and includes the marketing strategy you use to convince people to consider you as an employer.

Part of the marketing strategy you use to attract new talent is the job description, and even though you might not give it much thought, it turns out that getting this job description right is extremely important. As pointed out in a recent Next Level Purchasing (now the Certitrek NLPA) white-paper, an outdated purchasing job description can have undesirable effects on a company’s talent management strategy. According to Next Level Purchasing, there are two severe consequences associated with using outdated purchasing job descriptions:

  • an outdated purchasing job description is likely to attract a purchaser who possessed the skills necessary for succeeding in previous years, but who does not possess the skills necessary for success today
  • an outdated purchasing job description can set the bar too low for the standard skill levels to which your current professionals will aspire

As a former R&D director, I can attest to the importance of a good job description. Without one, your probability of attracting the right candidate are low. For instance, although I can remember having to sift through fifty to one hundred applications on a regular basis just to find three to five candidates worth an interview even with a good job description, I can also remember more than one occasion where I did not get to write the job description and where I could not identify one suitable candidate among dozens upon dozens of applications. So what did this tell me? A bad job description was very unlikely to yield good candidates and a good job description, which was much more likely to yield good candidates, also served as a good foundation for eliminating those candidates obviously inappropriate for the job without the need for a lengthy interview process.

The white-paper also outlined the important components of today’s purchasing job descriptions, and, like many of the articles that Next Level Purchasing makes available on its website, is worth at least a once-over.

The Purchasing Leader’s Guide to a More Successful Team

Recently, Next Level Purchasing (now the Certitrek NLPA) published “The Purchasing Leader’s Guide to a More Successful Team” that outlined Seven Steps For Improving Skills and Getting Better Results. Noting that many organizations only have one or two superstar team members that can handle the most challenging projects, that a purchasing department should be the organizational center-of-excellence, and that there’s no reason your entire team can’t excel, Charles Dominick, President & CPO of Next Level Purchasing put together a simple seven step process that any organization can follow to improve their team. The document might not cover every possible thing that one could do, but it’s a great start as any department that effectively implements and masters the steps provided will certainly be above average as a result.

The seven steps outlined by the document are:

  • Document Departmental Goals
  • Identify the Necessary Skills
  • Develop a Methodology to Assess Skills
  • Determine Skill Gaps
  • Define a Skills Development RoadMap
  • Improve Skill Levels
  • Measure & Sustain Improvements

They are important because:

  • It’s hard to identify necessary skills without goals.
  • Once you’ve identified the skills, you can identify who should have them.
  • You need to know how competent your people are with respect to each required skill to assess gaps.
  • You need to know what the gaps are in order to identify appropriate training.
  • The roadmap helps you identify which skills are important.
  • Skill level improvements are accompanied by improvements in sourcing results.
  • Measurements let you know how effective each skill level improvement initiative was and helps you select the “training” that is most appropriate for your team.

And you should definitely download “The Purchasing Leader’s Guide to a More Successful Team” because:

  • It gives you some examples of the right way to state measurable goals.
  • It outlines common skill dimensions that you should be sure to consider.
  • It defines three different skill assessment methods.
  • It tells you what’s important when it comes to skill gap identification.
  • It describes five different ways you can prioritize professional development.
  • It outlines different ways you can improve skill levels.
  • It gives you some ideas for measuring skill improvements in a manner that can be communicated to management.

Junket Junking with James Jin

While I was visiting MFG headquarters in Atlanta yesterday, I had the pleasure of sitting down for a few minutes with James Jin, who runs MFG’s Shanghai office (which covers all of Asia at the moment). James, who hosted last year’s webinar on Surviving China’s Rapidly Changing Sourcing Tides is a rare character who not only deeply understands both the North American business world and the Chinese business world, but who also sees what’s needed to bridge them into a more seamless global marketplace, which is something he does on a daily basis through MFG. It was a pleasure to discuss both what he thought were the most critical areas of focus for MFG, and other companies doing business in China, as well as what his biggest challenges were, because it not only highlighted the differences in doing business with China, but also the similarities – which I don’t think enough people spend enough time on.

From James’ perspective, the three most critical aspects that MFG (and other businesses entering or doing business in the Chinese marketplace) needs to focus on are:

  • Any international business can’t afford to miss the China market
    Low cost country sourcing might be going away, or changing in nature, but China is here to stay as not only a huge supply base, but an economic development opportunity.
  • There is a huge buy-side demand, growing larger by the day.
    Not only does China have one of the largest emerging middle-classes in the developing world, but they already have one of the largest middle-classes in the world. (Think about it, they have over 1.3 Billion people!) China is not just a large supply-side opportunity, but they are a large sell-side opportunity for any company that can offer the right products at the right prices.
  • The key to success is to think globally, but act locally.
    Doing business in China requires a balance and an understanding of local culture and geography.

However, James’ answer to my inquiry on the three biggest challenges to doing business in China was even more revealing on what it takes to do business successfully in China than the three most important areas on which you need to focus. In short, the three biggest challenges are:

  • People
  • People
  • People

Despite the cultural and language differences, the reality is that doing business in China is just like doing business with most developed countries. They’re very mature about their approach to business (they understand that business ebbs and flows in a repeated cycle, and that just because they’re getting a lot of business today, that doesn’t mean they’ll be getting a lot tomorrow and that they’re going to have to work to get and keep new business), they have new plants with industry leading technology (in fact, some suppliers have the most modern plants in the world for what they produce due to recent investments to keep up with Western demand), the leaders understand that it’s all about the people (as almost everything but the human equation can be automated these days), but, even with 1.3+ Billion people, it’s a constant struggle to find the right people with the right education and the right skills for the job. Especially when they have to play in a global marketplace.

As for what’s going on with the rest of MFG, you’ll be hearing a lot more from them next quarter, and I’ll have more to discuss at a future time as well, but for now, I need to hit the road again and wonder just what Willie was thinking. (Obviously, he didn’t drive his own tour bus!!!)

the doctor’s Guest Posts: The Year in Review II

Since last year’s summary of my guest post contributions (in June), I’ve blogged a number of guest posts over on eSourcing Forum [WayBackMachine] as well as authored or co-authored a significant number of wiki-papers over on the eSourcing Wiki. I’ve also contributed articles to the EyeForProcurement monthly newsletter as well as Efficient Purchasing.

e-Sourcing Forum

December 2007 to June 2008

Regulations Unlimited
Strategies for Supply Chain Finance
Customs & Security
The Seven Scruples of a Sourcing Sensei
Discovering Your Leverage Points
Seven Risk Mitigation Strategies You Can Do With Smart Optimization
If it ain’t Multi-Tenant, then it ain’t got SaaS (co-authored with David Bush)
Not All Free Trade is Equal
Best Practice Freight Bidding
CSI: Corporate Social Irresponsibility
Critical Skills of Supply Chain Leaders
Devising an RFP That Works
Core Capabilities of Supplier Enablement
Is it Center of Excellence or MindSet of Excellence
Successful GPOs Are About Value, Not Cost Savings
Don’t Swing the Wrecking Ball Unless You’re Prepared for the Falling Debris
Can you really afford to leave Millions on the table?
Are You Managing Your Talent Chain?

June 2007 to December 2007

Supplier Enablement
Confucious eSourcing Project Management Tips
Brunswick Corporation’s e-Auction Best Practices
Collaborative Negotiation
Seven Tips for SaaS Selection
Incentives Motivate
Optimal E-Tool Selection
Five Ways to Take Your Sourcing to the Next Level
A Global Trade Primer
Applications of Spend Analysis
The Benefits of Purchasing Consortiums
Optimization is the Future And The Future is Now
Some Low Cost Country Sourcing Insights
Twelve Steps to Purchasing Program Predominance
Ten Tips for Talent Retention
A Case for E-Sourcing and E-Procurement Integration
Nine Steps to e-Procurement Success
Key Challenges of Tomorrow, Part II
Key Challenges of Tomorrow, Part III
Ten Common Negotiating Mistakes

Articles

Why aren’t you optimizing?, Efficient Purchasing Issue 5, Fall 2007

Why Aren’t You Optimizing Your Sourcing Decisions? EyeForProcurement August 2007 Newsletter