Supply Chain Matters Interview with John Sells: Incoming Board Chair, The Supply Chain Council- Part One Posting

Supply Chain Matters had the opportunity to chat with John Sells who is the recently elected Chairman, board of directors for the Supply Chain Council (SCC).

John’s day-to-day responsibilities involve his role as Senior Manager, Logistics and Sustainment at Lockheed Martin Corporation, focusing on corporate engineering, technology and performance based logistics.  We have had the opportunity to interview the chairs of SCC in the past, and wanted to also check-in with John regarding the thrust of SCC in the coming months.

For those readers unfamiliar with SCC, it is a global nonprofit organization whose methodology, diagnostic, and benchmarking tools help nearly a thousand organizations make dramatic and rapid improvements in their supply chain processes.  SCC is most associated with the creation and ongoing maturity of the Supply Chain Operations Reference (SCOR®) model which helps organizations determine and compare the performance of supply chain and related operations within their company or against other organizations.

In our interview, we touched upon a number of different areas. Because of the length of content, we divided the output of this interview into two separate postings.  This part one posting will share our interview exchange covering the first three questions.  Part two will share the remaing three questions.

Question: Could you briefly describe your past history with the Council and what led you to seek a board leadership role?

John’s involvement started some time ago and was specifically focused on the unique supply chain process challenges that are prevalent in aerospace and defense-oriented supply chain processes.  John joined with others to form a special interest group focused specifically on these unique industry needs, and worked with the team to develop a SCOR curriculum that was tailored to this industry.  An important consideration was incorporating concepts of performance based logistics within the SCOR framework.

John later became a SCOR certified instructor and remains focused and actively involved in Aerospace and Department of Defense (DOD) oriented supply chain process environmental frameworks.  John is quick to note how the SCOR framework can crack the code toward understanding certain industry unique needs of supply chain process as well as helping to uncover unnecessary complexity. These special interest group efforts have now been instrumental in shaping DOD policy and guidance to shape the concepts of performance based logistics contract metrics.

In his SCC tenure, John became more involved in SCC board level activities and is now the elected Board chairperson.  In our interview, John noted that his appointment is an indication that SCC is broadening to include a broader industry perspective beyond manufacturing focused supply chains.

Readers should also note that John’s appointment represents the first DOD industry representative to assume the chair position of SCC.

Question: What benefits and services will the Council continue to provide for its members?

John noted that the SCOR methodology continues to evolve and be improved upon through broader training, benchmarking and added process perspectives.  The SCOR model has recently been broadened to incorporate product design, product lifecycle and customer chain processes.  SCC is also finding ongoing success with more geographic focused training and events which allow each geography to incorporate unique supply chain process needs of the particular region.  Europe and Asia based chapters conduct their own unique events and the North America chapter will be hosting both its annual SCOR Users meeting in February, as well as the Supply Chain World North America conference in May of this year.

Beyond the SCOR methodology itself, John noted that SCC is broadening its perspective into other supply chain related needs.

Question: What role will the geographical regional chapters play in carrying out the mission of the Council?

John noted that it has become all too apparent that council members exist in a global economy, and that the fundamental baseline is what supply chain management looks like across the globe.  The board is of the belief that as more global efforts are supported, the more the benefits will accrue to all. John expressed this as a “force multiplier effect”.  Along with this comes a high reliance on the local regional chapters to identify the unique needs for their region.

Feedback among the various geographic regions has been generally positive and the regional chapters are growing.  There are more activities now being sponsored within regions and the pride of ownership is increasing.

One metric noted was the level of SCOR model awareness across the globe. And that SCOR-P certification is catching on internationally. The geographic chapters of SCC  have further increased their efforts to provide more localized awareness and training opportunities.  Today, the SCOR methodology, along with training related to the model, is delivered in multiple languages.

The SCC board is also facilitating more local feedback by scheduling ongoing board meetings in conjunction with local regional events. With this board meeting schedule, local member companies now have the opportunity to be able to directly meet and interact with SCC board members on overall needs of the council.  John feels that this has allowed feedback to bubble-up more quickly and is working out quite well.

This concludes this part one posting.

Bob Ferrari

Disclosure:  The author of this posting, Bob Ferrari, serves as a volunteer on the SCC North America Leadership team.

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