On April 2^nd thru the 4^th, the Supply Chain Council (SCC) is conducting its annual Supply Chain North America 2012 Conference, which this year is being held at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in downtown Miami Florida.

This year’s conference has as its overall theme: A Shift to Integrative Thinking, and will include sessions that address needs in the areas of customer delight, supply chain operational excellence, people and talent, and the need for resilience. Last year’s conference garnered highly positive feedback from attendees and this year’s event has similar potential.

The lineup of speakers includes timely keynotes from Donald Wirth, Vice President, Global Operations-Corporate Supply Chain at DuPont, and Steven A. Melnyk, Professor of Operations and Supply Chain Management at Michigan State University. Other conference speakers include senior supply chain managers representing Anheuser Busch Inbev, Avnet, Inc., Cienna Communications, Dell, Land O’Lakes, and SAP, among others.

I’m delighted to announce that I will once again be moderating the Pundits and Influencers panel discussion which is scheduled on Wednesday, the final day of the conference.  This will be my second year of panel moderation for the annual conference.  The panel itself is designed to provide attendees the latest perspectives of upcoming business, process and technology trends impacting global supply chains.  We broadened the format last year to provide the audience with more diverse perspectives, hence the name changed from the traditional industry analyst panel to an influencer’s panel.  The change was well received by last year’s audience.

The panel will include perspectives involving recognized supply chain thought leaders representing academic, consulting, social media and industry analyst perspectives. Panelists thus far confirmed include:

• Steven A. Melnyk, Professor of Operations and Supply Chain Management, Michigan State University
• Roddy Martin, Senior Vice President, Global Supply Chain Practice, Competitive Capabilities International (Former Vice President at AMR Research/Gartner)
• Matthew Davis, Research Director, Supply Chain, Gartner Inc.
• Bob Parker, Group Vice President, IDC Manufacturing Insights and IDC Retail Insights
• Yours truly

My goal is to have the panel discuss and interact on current top-of-mind topics including what integrative supply chain capabilities equate to, the impact of a rather tumultuous 2011 across global supply chains and other topics.

More detailed information regarding the conference, including detailed agenda and registration information, can be accessed by clicking on the conference graphic located on our Conferences panel on the right-hand side.

Please consider joining me at Supply Chain World North America this coming April.

Bob Ferrari, Founder and Executive Editor

On the second and final day of the Supply Chain World North America conference, sponsored by the Supply Chain Council, I was privileged to be asked by the conference planning committee to moderate the Pundits and Influencers panel discussion.

This year, we wanted the panel to include broader perspectives and viewpoints on what is occurring across global supply chains, perspectives that span industry analyst, consulting, blogging and academia.

We were fortunate to secure a stellar group of panelists which included:

Simon Ellis, Practice Director, Supply Chain Strategies, IDC Manufacturing Insights

Brad Householder, Partner and Director, Supply Chain Management Practice, PRTM

Noha Tohamy, Vice President, Supply Chain Research, AMR Research / Gartner

Nick Little, Assistant Director, Executive Development, Eli Broad Graduate School, Michigan State University

I asked each of our panelists to articulate the one capability area they believed will be the most important for supply chain organization’s to focus upon in this post-recovery era.  The capabilities mentioned were:

• Responding to demand volatility
• Strategic alignment of the supply chain with the company’s business goals
• Supply chain managers possessing the skills to not only master their function, but more importantly, the soft skills required to sell ideas and innovation.
• Filling the pipeline for new supply chain talent by offering more opportunities for entry-level talent to gain needed cross-functional experience, and for educational institutions to perform a ‘supply-demand’ analysis relative to preparing students for the different skills required in managing globally extended supply chains.

Our discussion and panel interchange  time flew by quickly, but the panel was able to respond to questions directed at the current occurrences of supply chain disruption, including the implications of the recent devastating earthquake and tsunami that effected Japan and multiple industry supply chains. Other questions were directed at what specific general management skills are required in supply chain management, as well as the impact of the organizations in the emerging markets making future impacts on supply chain management.

As we concluded the panel, Noha Tohamy provided a rather interesting perspective.  She noted that some attendees were asking her earlier, what was the next ‘big thing’ that AMR Research/Gartner was declaring for supply chains in the coming months.  Her response was, “there is no new big thing.” “The challenge for supply chain teams in this next era is to continue to work and improve on all the required capabilities of demand response, agility, integrated planning and other declared competencies.”

To summarize our overall experiences and takeaways from this year’s conference, we close with some quotations captured throughout the two days.

“The unthinkable does happen- who would have thought that both an earthquake and a tsunami would occur at the very same time.”

Don Weintriitt, Global Supply Chain Director, Dow Chemical Company

“The planets are aligned for deeper supply chain analytics”

Tom Davenport, President’s Distinguished Professor of Information Technology and Management, Babson College

“Supply chain organizations cannot just return to the former ways of doing business. This new era requires far different means for fulfilling customer and supply chain needs.”

Dave Malenfant, Vice President, Global Supply Chain, Alcon Laboratories

“Once you figure out that something has gone wrong in the supply chain – the response is critically important.”   “Globalize what you can- localize what you must.”

Lalit Wadhwa, Vice President, Global Supply Chain Operations, Avnet Inc.

“Deep collaboration with suppliers and customers is never wasted”

Don Esses, Vice President, Supply Chain Operations, QCT Division, Qualcomm

Supply Chain Matters again thanks the North America Leadership team of Supply Chain Council for the opportunity to participate in this year’s annual conference.

Readers can view our other previous conference commentaries at the following links:

Dispatch One

Dispatch Two

Bob Ferrari

The second day of the Supply Chain World North America conference  was just as informative as the first, and the highlight was a presentation from a supply chain grounded CEO.

Readers can view our day one commentary at this link.

The morning keynote was from Alan D. Wilson, the CEO and President of McCormick & Company, Inc., who’s corporate headquarters were but a few blocks from the conference venue in Baltimore.  CEO Wilson’s presentation was insightful from two perspectives. First, Wilson comes from background and grounded experience in supply chains, having served in the military as a logistician, and having contributed in supply chain roles at Procter and Gamble.  He clearly understands and can relate to supply chain management strategy and importance.

More importantly, Wilson provided a live demonstration on how supply chain professionals can speak and relate to the language of the executive suite.  In his articulation of the shareholder and business goals for McCormick, he was able to clearly map these top level goals to required metrics in material conversion, supply chain and process reliability areas, all within a single, cascading slide. McCormick also has unique supply chain challenges in that its business model of spice and flavor products requires a high level of SKU’s, as well as the need to source inbound materials from over 50 countries.  It was great to observe a CEO who could also clearly articulate these challenges to an audience dominated by supply chain professionals.

Another important strength brought forward was McCormick’s strong emphasis and reinforcement of corporate culture being the fabric of the company.  This culture includes an obsession with quality and firm and demonstrated beliefs in respect, inclusion, recognition and collaboration. McCormick believes that taking care of employees will lead to employees taking good care of customers and suppliers. A noted example, during the darkest days of the past global recession, McCormick continued to invest in people and in benefit programs. Wilson firmly believes that this strategy, although counter to the prevailing industry norms, paid enormous dividends in commitment and performance. There is also a strong linkage between desired outcomes in business performance with organizational design and individual employee incentives.  The management tenet of measure and reward what you want to change is alive and well at McCormick.

McCormick is not immune to ongoing supply chain challenges in the area of sourcing risk, exploding commodity costs or overall improvement in inventory turns. However,  listening to Wilson, one gets a clear sense that the entire organization is aligned and focused on these challenges and remedial plans.

It would be great if every major supply chain conference could have a CEO guest speaker with the DNA of Alan Wilson.

Bob Ferrari

Day one of the Supply Chain World North America Conference featured a variety of interesting and insightful presentation as well as the opportunity to renew old and make new acquaintances.

This morning’s keynote delivered by Tom Davenport, Professor of Information Technology and Management at Babson College was titled Competing on Supply Chain Analytics.  This was a very timely presentation given the messages we heard at last week’s SAP Sapphire conference regarding an upcoming era of in-memory computing and broader, faster analytical computing capabilities.  Key takeaways from Professor Davenport talk included messages that good data and executive leadership are the most important pre-requisites for meaningful analytics, insuring that all supply chain analytics are tied to specific decisions and desired outcomes.  Also emphasized was that organizations often tend to dwell more on descriptive analytics (what is occurring or has occurred) vs. prescriptive analytics (what’s the best set of probable outcomes).

Throughout the day we had the opportunity to attend different sessions that included Dow Chemical’s strategies and commitment toward driving social and environmental values across the supply chain, Lenovo’s efforts to segment its supply chain design and fulfillment outcomes, along with Motorola Mobility Division’s ongoing supply chain transformation.

This afternoon featured an executive panel discussing current challenges of the post-recessionary supply chain. Panel participants identified supply chain security and risk management, increased regulatory compliance, a growing gap in supply chain talent and transformation to the “new normal’ of business as common cross-industry challenges.  Dave Malenfant, Vice President, Global Supply Chain for Alcon Laboratories made a very astute statement.  Dave observed that after supply chains were ripped apart during the recession, many may believe that returning to previous structures and organizational norms are the path forward.  Dave emphatically declared that this is not going to work since this new era requires a far different set of organizational capabilities and supply chain process responsiveness.  All of the panelists also reinforced the growing gap in management skills in end-to-end supply chain management, particularly in the growing emerging market regions.

Day one concluded with the announcement of the 2011 Supply Chain Council North America Awards for Excellence.  Supply Chain Matters echoes congratulations to the 2011 award recipients:

For Operations Excellence: Celestica and their Project FireFox initiatives in dramatically improving inventory turns and ROIC.

For Academic Achievement: The University of Tennessee and performance based procurement initiative developed for the U.S. Air Force

For Technology Advancement: SAP and its efforts with Coca Cola to implement SAP Business Objects Supply Chain Performance Management for supply chain wide analytics.

For Defense Sector Operational Excellence: U.S. Air Force Global Logistics Support Center for its initiatives in supporting combat operations.

A very busy day indeed at Supply Chain World North America.

Bob Ferrari

Supply Chain Matters will be again out on the road this week.  Tomorrow we are off to Baltimore to attend the Supply Chain Council’s annual conference, Supply Chain World North America which is being held on Wednesday and Thursday.

This particular conference was on a bit of a hiatus during the global recession years of 2009-2010, and is now back.  This year’s theme of Building Supply Chain Capabilities for Future Success was designed to help attendees to focus and discuss the appropriate global supply chain business process strategies in this post-recessionary economy.  There is a great line-up of supply chain executive and other speakers speaking on very timely topics, with lots of opportunities for networking.

This author will be facilitating the Pundits and Influencers Panel Discussion being held on Thursday.  This year, the conference planning committee elected to alter the traditional industry analyst panel to include a broader lens on global supply chains.  We have assembled a panel consisting of influential industry analysts, consultants, influencers and of course, bloggers.

Readers can look forward to subsequent Supply Chain Matters commentaries reflecting on the conference as well as our panel discussion, so please keep this destination on your browser favorites listing.

Bob Ferrari- Executive Editor