Staff to meet the need: match your staff's skills against the corporate needs of your supply chain

Frontline Solutions, March, 2005 by George D. Miller

Does your supply chain support your company's business strategy?

At the supply chain level, the question is perhaps better phrased this way: Is your supply chain organization structured around the skills it needs?

There's a good chance it's not. As a business changes, so do the demands on its supply chain. Managers have to make sure that they have people with the required skills to get today's job done. At the recent Supply Chain Council executive retreat in Phoenix, Joseph Roussel, Paris-based director for management consultancy PRTM, likened corporate supply chains to geologic formations, shaped by the forces of time and pressure on the company and its staff. The likelihood of any such geologic formation matching the needs of your company today--now--is small, unless you keep on top of it.

In contrast to just a few years ago, fewer dollars are being spent today on supply chain execution functions; more dollars are being spent on planning and forecasting functions. In this short timeframe, it would be easy for the supply chain skill-set to become sub-par in the required planning expertise. People simply weren't trained in the disciplines needed today unless they've proactively kept up, or been kept up. Business schools weren't teaching it in the 1990s, and the venerable MBA has done did little to prepare graduates for the operational challenges of today.

Good training is available, however, through the likes of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Masters in Logistics (MLOG) program and Georgia Tech's Engineering Masters in Logistics. (For insight into the great work and thinking going on at Georgia Tech, see the monthly "Frontline Ingenuity" column by the program director, John Vande Vate, at www.frontlinetoday.com.)

The value of such programs is illustrated no better than in the following statistic, provided by Chris Caplice, executive director of the nine-month MLOG program: "The median starting salary for the class of 2004 is 80% higher than the median of their incoming annual salary just nine months ago at the start of the program," he said.

Reconcile your supply chain staff against your supply chain objectives, as dictated by your company's strategic objectives. Then make your case to fund the training--or the staff--you need.