We would like to again call Supply Chain Matters readers attention to two upcoming conferences involving Executive Editor, Bob Ferrari.

On April 28-29, the 2011 OpsInsight Leadership Forum will be held in Boston. This forum will focus on important challenges and approaches undertaken by operations management teams and includes stellar listing of planned speakers from organizations such as Accenture, Aberdeen Group, Economist Intelligence Unit, Kotter International, MTV Networks and Xerox.  Topics include strategy to execution, lean concepts, innovation and change management. We are pleased to announce that Bob Ferrari will serve as master of ceremonies for this event including the conference kickoff presentation.

On May 24-25, the Supply Chain Council will be hosting the Supply Chain World North America conference in Baltimore. These are not normal times for global supply chains.  Speakers at the conference will be addressing needs for building and sustaining supply chain capabilities in the “new normal” of post-recessionary business where business change and unplanned events occur at an extraordinary pace. Join us for a particular session which will be the Pundit and Thought Leaders Panel Exchange, scheduled for day two of the conference, which will be moderated by Bob Ferrari.  Panel participants will include AMR Research/Gartner, IDC Manufacturing Insights, Industry Directions. In this session, industry analysts, noted industry influencers and bloggers will comment and exchange insights on what can be expected in global supply chain needs in this next era, and you will not want to miss this dynamic exchange from some of the most insightful supply chain observers and thought leaders.

Topics addressed will include:
• In light of the increased incidents of supply chain risk and disruption, what are the proactive outsourcing strategies for the next two years?
• What are the next step for organizations in Sales and Operations Planning?
• What strategies can we use to align global supply chain operations in the ‘new normal’?
• What are the talent and information technology skills required in the post-recessionary supply chain environment?

Information and registration information for either of these conferences can be accessed via the Conferences section appearing in the right-hand panel of this site.

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B2B e-commerce provider GXS announced that it had acquired supplier information and community management technology provider RollStream. Specific financial information regarding the transaction was not made available. An FAQ document on the GXS site notes that this acquisition advances GXS’s strategy to speed and simplify the integration of global business communities.

This acquisition comes as no surprise, at least to this author, since RollStream was a technology vendor with a lot of upside opportunity.

Supply Chain Matters previously commented on our impressions of RollStream back in June.  We were favorably impressed with the business approach, user interfaces and breadth of information management functionality. We were especially impressed with the social media based design aspects of RollStream’s Community Platform.  This provider has a marquee customer base of customers in healthcare distribution, grocery and manufacturing related supply chains. A noted drawback was that the RollStream platform per se lacked transactional or value-stream planning capabilities, but this acquisition is an obvious response to that drawback.  Both companies stand to gain from this event, since the GXS EDI and transactional platform now has the opportunity to leverage RollStream’s social and supplier collaboration platform.

While some would question the definition or value of social supply chain concepts and technology, we believe that this area will prove to be more important over the long-term.

If you desire to gain further understanding of social supply chain potential, you are welcomed to view an on-demand thought leaders webcast previously delivered by Lora Cecere, Altimeter Group, and myself that explored both the front-end demand and supply concepts of social supply chain.

Supply Chain Matters will have further, more in-depth commentary regarding the implications of this acquisition after we have had the opportunity to secure a further briefing from both parties.

Bob Ferrari

The Wall Street Journal reported today(paid subscription may be required) that Johnson and Johnson will embark on yet another  reorganization in the wake of significant manufacturing quality problems resulting in multiple product recall incidents  that stretch back to 2009. There have been 19 product recalls dating back to September 2009. J&J’s McNeill Consumer Healthcare Group is the primary manufacturer of cold, allergy and pain relief medicines under the popular Tylenol, Benadryl, Motrin and Zyrtec brand names which have been involved in various product recall incidents.

According to the WSJ article, the McNeill unit in the U.S. will be spun-out as a separate organization. The unit will be headed by Patrick Mutchler, a 35 year veteran employee who has had a variety of assignments on the consumer business side.  Also reported was that executives Marc Robinson, who had overseen J&J’s OTC worldwide businesses, and Peter Luther, who had been president of the McNeil  unit, have been given other roles.  These moves were apparently motivated to give more focused attention to quality and compliance needs as well as restoring consumer confidence in J&J consumer brands.  Supply Chain Matters commented in late December on a series of previous executive promotional appointments at J&J which were designed to assure more focused accountability and attention to company-wide manufacturing and supply chain process needs. These included the promotion of executives Alex Gorsky and Sheri McCoy, who were speculated to be in line for succeeding current Chairmen and CEO William Weldon.  We communicated in that commentary our hope that the newly elevated executives would put personal competitive instincts aside and come together with a unified plan of action to address the ongoing quality crisis. (As a side note, Mr. Weldon was granted a 3 percent base salary increase for 2011, but his 2010 bonus was cut by 45 percent.  The increase was reported to be based on Mr. Weldon’s handling of the product recall crisis.)

As these new appointments were announced, another J& J product recall announcement came yesterday involving 34,000 bottles of Tylenol 8-Hour Extended Release caplets after continued consumer complaints of musty or moldy odor. Readers might recall that similar complaints, tracked to chemicals applied to wooden pallets, existed in certain 2010 recalls. In this occurrence, the presence of trace elements of the chemicals TBA (2,4,6-tribromoanisole) and TCA (2,46-trichloroanisole) were linked to the recalled product, which is different than previous recalls. J&J also as a precautionary measure, widened a wholesale-level recall first announced in January, adding 10 product lots comprising 717,696 bottles of various Benadryl, Tylenol and Sudafed products. A review of past manufacturing methods found cases where equipment cleaning procedures were insufficient or not adequately documented.

While J&J is taking organizational action to resolve its ongoing quality crisis, one has to wonder about the clarity and speed of management actions.  What does a spinoff of McNeill accomplish?  More importantly, where are the accountability efforts across all of J&J’s manufacturing and supply chain activities?  It was previously noted that Mr. Gorsky was given responsibility for proactively addressing company-wide manufacturing and supply chain quality measures while Ms. McCoy had oversight of the consumer business units. There have, at least to our knowledge been no high-level executive firings, other than announcement last September of the early retirement of Colleen Goggins, the former lead of the consumer business.

As noted back in October, no company, not even J&J, can rest on a previous reputation of quality and responsiveness. J&J needs to fix its quality and supply-chain problems fast. It is unclear that adding more executive layers of focus and responsibility will help in this effort. What J&J needs is a complete transformational strategy that encompasses accountability, process, technology and change management components.  Time is of the essence along with clarity of communications and action.

Bob Ferrari