Category Archives: Training

Educating to Reduce Risk (in Your [Retail] Supply Chain)

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Editor’s Note: This post is from regular contributor Norman Katz, Sourcing Innovation’s resident expert on supply chain fraud and supply chain risk. Catch up on his column in the archives.

Being just a little past my mid-40s I realize I’m at risk (how appropriate or rather inappropriate is that in this blog!) of dating myself, but does anyone remember the phrase “The Three Rs”?

This phrase represents the basic foundation of education: reading, writing, and arithmetic.

Still to this day, and probably emphasized by all the standardized testing done which grades the performance of schools, I don’t think the necessity of this trio of core skills is any less important. However, I’d like to throw in a fourth (and actually fifth) R in regards to the benefits of education: risk reduction.

Of all the supply chains in the world, the retail supply chain in the United States is arguably the toughest and most sophisticated of them all. The smallest disruptions can result in profit losses and missed sales. Timeframes are very tight and the drive towards 100% perfection is relentless.

Retail suppliers invest heavily in technology, automation, and business processes to ensure they are complimentary collaborators with their retail trading partners, all with the goal of reducing the risk of not shipping the right products in the right time at the right quantity to the right destination in order to ensure their products are on the shelf when the consumer wants to buy them.

But what about investing in education to reduce risk? Can technology and automation eclipse the need for some sound, basic education on how to participate in a supply chain, retail or other? I would argue that such education is absolutely necessary. Without a good educational foundation, enterprises run the risk of incorrectly investing in technology and business processes that fail to truly address the root-cause of problems or don’t enable growth, planned or otherwise.

Selecting the right education provider can be tricky in-and-of-itself. There are plenty of companies who offer quality training. Do your due diligence and investigate the company and its trainers for experience and depth of knowledge. Keep in mind that anyone can offer training classes and that slick sounding company names may be just that and offer little in terms of training that will have any substance or credentials in daily business activities.

Certifications and training courses are often provided by trade associations. This is good because trade associations often carry a “name” or brand with them so there should be confidence in the quality of the education and that it will be recognized through one or more industry verticals.

Some associations are independent and are thus self-certifying. For these independent associations some have grown quite large and are well-recognized such that their certification is accepted and respected. Look at who is backing the certification and whether the backer has respect and visibility throughout one or more industry verticals. Is the training endorsed by outside entities? And just because a list of well-known companies is provided does not necessarily mean that the training is recognized as a standard or is widely respected. Do your homework! How long has the association been around and how many members does it have?

What this boils down to is that fraud can be perpetrated by training and education organizations too. Knowingly misrepresenting goods and services is fraud.

Buyer beware. Trust but verify. Due diligence.

Not just catchy phrases but ones to live by.

Norman Katz, Katzscan

e-Leaders Speak: Ron Southard of SafeSourcing on “Creatively Educating our Sourcing Professionals Today for the Challenges of Tomorrow”

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Today’s guest post is from Ron Southard of SafeSourcing.

While economic conditions and cost containment continue to drive top of mind thinking, there are a variety of cost effective educational alternatives available to procurement professionals that don’t require travel, fees or time away from the office that leaders should consider.

I was asked to use the subject of “Sourcing Tomorrow: The Leaders Speak”.While there are any number of subjects this author could cover, what I believe should be top of mind for senior sourcing leaders as the new year approaches at warp speed is the continuing education of our sourcing professionals.

This can be accomplished without attending expensive seminars, solution provider gatherings or even trade shows. All that’s required is a little creativity and everyone on the team can attend.

Today’s World Wide Web, empowered by the Internet, provides a unique opportunity to those seeking education on any subject that one can imagine. As a source of information, the internet actually provides for close to three degrees of separation from just about any subject one chooses to study. Even the human web, which is commonly referred to as having six degrees of separation – which means that everyone is at most six steps away from any other person on earth, is not as closely connected as today’s data.

The nice part about the use of the web is that it really is open source intelligence gathering at its best. It is simply the gathering of information from publicly available sources and analyzing it to produce something actionable like a seminar. If you can Google, Ask, or Bing, information is available for your use. The only concern one may have is the quality of the information you are searching. This means you can not trust everything you read. I would not go so far as saying that trusted information networks are required, but you should check out your sources.

Sources of information available to sourcing professionals for information gathering could be blogs, wikis, social networks, professional networks like LinkedIn, provider websites, glossaries and a variety of search engines. So, how should we use these tools to develop high quality educational programs internally?

First and foremost, there has to be commitment from the leadership of the supply chain or sourcing organization. With this commitment in place, you might consider something like the following.

  1. Bring your sourcing / supply chain management team together.
  2. Notify key managers that each will be required to deliver a sourcing subject seminar throughout the year. The sessions will last 2 hours followed by lunch.
  3. All sourcing / supply chain associates will be invited to attend each seminar.
  4. Conduct a whiteboard session to select subjects for each seminar.
  5. Assign seminar subjects to someone that does not have that area of responsibility in order to facilitate management learning.
  6. Insure subject matter selected supports cross functional learning.
  7. Ask your solutions providers to support your user education by sponsoring lunch or breaks.
  8. Be creative in the delivery process. Anything goes. Think props and handouts.
  9. Make the session interactive.
  10. Provide a survey before lunch.

Let’s take a look at the subject of “Supply Chain Stress Points” as an example of a subject that might be selected for a seminar. Now, let’s look at how we might begin to research this subject.

I always like to begin with Google. If we Google “Supply Chain Stress Points”, Google returns approximately 507,000 hits. I’m sure we could begin to build something from here. If I select the 2nd hit, which was “Stress on the Supply Chain: Where is the Weakest Link?” when I searched, I find that the article contains a number of terms that may require further research, such as “Supplier Support Program”. This subject can then be researched using any number of on-line tools, including Wikipedia. It does not take too much effort to build a pretty decent two hour presentation for your seminar. Finally, always remember to credit your sources. They just provided you with an inexpensive education.

Some, but certainly not all, of the benefits of these types of internal seminars or programs are as follows.

  1. Builds a sense of team
  2. Provides cross functional education for the presenter
  3. Provides cross functional education for the entire sourcing / supply chain team
  4. Supports the development of a learning organization
  5. Reduces travel expenses
  6. Allows everyone to attend

In order to be prepared for the challenges that tomorrow’s sourcing will provide, leaders must consider creative ways of educating our procurement professionals today.

Thanks, Ron.

Training is Cheap!

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I was overjoyed to see a recent piece in Procurement Leaders that said “if you think education is expensive, try ignorance”. Because, in spend management, where most professionals don’t have at least a decade of experience in every category they have to manage (and often don’t have all the tools and technologies they should have to help them), a lack of training ultimately results in a lack of critical skills and best practices that end up costing many large organizations millions of dollars annually. This is because the potential cost reductions are just left on the table by procurement professionals who didn’t have the skills to identify and negotiate them.

Furthermore, with many courses, and even certifications, available today for just a few thousand dollars, not providing your staff with training at least semi-annually is just ridiculous. (See the training and on-demand resource guides on the resource site for some examples.) Not only is the cost less than 10% of your average salary for a mid-to-high end procurement professional, but it’s less than 1% of the savings that person can generate off of one high-end procurement alone. If it helps them shave another 200K, or more, off a multi-million dollar procurement … it’s paid for itself twenty to one hundred times over. That’s a greater ROI than even industry leading spend analysis and decision optimization can deliver. (Furthermore, only trained professionals can maximize the ROI from these tools.)

So train your people TODAY. And maybe, just maybe, this recession will be the best thing that ever happened to you as your skilled and educated staff helps your organization blow your competition away.

Training Doesn’t Have to Be a Budget Buster

I was glad to see this recent article in Industry Week which echoed a key point I’ve been trying to make over the past few years, that “training doesn’t have to be a budget buster” and that affordable options are available.

Consider the following options outlined in the article:

  • Onsite
    Bring in an expert instructor for hands-on training. You’ll get a lot of bang for your 2K a day, especially if you qualify for federal reimbursement under the Workforce Investment Act of 1998 which can see you getting a reimbursement of 60% to 100%. Alternatively, you can send two employees to a train-the-trainers program, and they can pass the knowledge on to your entire workforce.
  • Seminars
    Instructor-Led seminars limited to 10 students insure that each student gets instructor time and maximizes the information transferred.
  • Online Training
    There are a slew of affordable on-line and distance training options these days, some of which even come with certifications for less than you’ll likely pay for your shiny new iPhone over the course of a year.
  • Local Colleges / Trade Schools
    Many of these have very cost effective programs, especially if they are state or province (co) sponsored for local students.
  • Simulation Software
    Allows students to learn through tutorials and trial-and-error without risks to equipment or currently operating processes, often for just a few hundred dollars per student.
  • Webinars
    A sequence of properly selected webinars can often provide basic information at little or no cost.

So where can you find these resources? Start with the Sourcing Innovation Resource Site which lists dozens of affordable seminars, classroom training, and on-demand online training options as well as hundreds of archived webcasts and podcasts.

Identifying Individual Learning Patterns is Key to Effective E-Sourcing Training

A recent article on Supply Management . com by Aneela Nasim on “effective e-Sourcing” notes that you will only maximize your benefit if your staff are effectively trained on the system and know how to use it. In order to help you devise an appropriate training program, the author notes that the best way to devise training programs is to tailor it to user roles and individual learning methodologies.

The author suggests you start by outlining the key roles, such as “regular buyer”, “super user”, and “cross-functional team member”, defining the activities required, and then outlining the key methodological and technological aspects of the process and system that need to be addressed.

Then, within each group, determine the learning styles will be displayed by your users — such as the activist, reflector, theorist, and pragmatist learning styles defined by Honey & Mumford — and tailor your training materials and presentations appropriately.

Finally, encourage and enable your team members to share what they learned with each other. Users who teach each other and support each other are more likely to buy into the system and champion its use.