We encounter lots of problems with supply chains.
- Customers complain about late and incomplete deliveries;
- Vendors charge higher prices for materials;
- Some products turned out defective;
- Manufacturing didn’t follow the production plan;
- Trucks didn’t show up to load for delivery;
- Expenses are running over budget;
- We don’t have enough skilled people for our operations.
But how serious are these problems? How do we as managers prioritise which problems we will put most of our time and resources into?
When the World Health Organisation (WHO) declared the coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic in mid-March 2020, governments immediately restricted the movements of people and merchandise. Supply chains went into standstill. Consumers rushed to buy and stock groceries & basic household items, which resulted in empty store shelves everywhere. Factories and offices were shut. Ports were closed. Perishable items and food got stuck in storage facilities and many products ended up undelivered and wasted.
We saw the pandemic problem as a health crisis. We sought ways to protect ourselves. We bought masks and stocked up on disinfectants, toilet paper, and soap. We stopped visiting relatives, cancelled attendance to parties & get-togethers, and even avoided going out for walks around our neighbourhoods.
At the same time, we struggled to continue making a living to support and feed our families. We figured out how to work from home, set up e-commerce websites to sell our products, and meet with business contacts via videoconferences & online chat rooms.
For the critical factories and facilities that needed to stay open, we bought and distributed to our employees all the personal protective equipment (PPE) we could find. We installed hand-washing stations at entrances and at workplaces. We separated workers as much as we could via dividers and staggered shifts. We mandated regular coronavirus tests for everyone and asked any employee who exhibited any hint of coronavirus symptoms to go on leave.
As much as we treated the coronavirus pandemic as a health crisis, we did not recognise it as a supply chain crisis.
Supply chains from their sources to their end-users employ millions of people around the world. Yet, they remain an untapped potential for enterprise growth and competitive advantage. More so for nations and countries seeking continuous revenues from global trade. There are lots at stake and much to reap from supply chains.
We, however, are hardly moving to improve supply chains. We failed to respond to the disruptions of the pandemic. We never had really put that much effort into improving our supply chains, before the pandemic, during the pandemic, and after the pandemic.
One reason for this is we simply didn’t treat supply chain problems with much urgency and importance.
Many corporations don’t have chief supply chain officers (CSCO’s). Many don’t even have supply chain managers in their organisations. Some enterprises, especially large multi-national corporations, separate their purchasing, manufacturing, & logistics departments in which each end up with conflicting priorities. And many executives push down many supply chain concerns to middle level managers, who end up doing more day-to-day troubleshooting than improving.
Supply chains became a hot-button issue during the pandemic. Media coverage had put supply chains on the limelight thanks to global shortages and runaway prices of products. We as enterprise executives promised better results. Resilience became the most popular supply chain buzzword.
Many of us who are supply chain managers are nothing more than daily fire-fighters. We sometimes have no time to think supply chain problems through when we face them. We fight them like fires, fighting to mitigate them before they become bigger problems.
Real fire-fighters work just as hard preventing fires & minimising risks as much as they work hard in putting them out and rescuing people. Fire-fighters audit & inspect facilities, train fire brigades, hold seminars, and conduct drills.
Fire-fighters, however, can do only so much. They communicate that the best way to avoid problems is for enterprise stakeholders to take the lead in making their enterprises’ systems & structures more risk-free.
The same goes for us as supply chain managers. We try to solve problems before they become fires (i.e., burning platforms). We formulate strategies & roadmaps. We hire & assign talented people to handle key operations. We bolster our resources, build inventories, and add capacities.
Sometimes, these measures work. But problems and their disruptions still inevitably pop up and we’d find ourselves once again fighting fires.
We often make the same promise at the aftermath of a supply chain crisis: it won’t happen again. But we don’t say how we’ll make sure it does not happen again.
We don’t say how we’ll make sure we won’t have future ‘fires’ because often, we don’t really know what the problems were and how important & urgent they were.
We will always encounter supply chain problems. They are inevitable. They may not be identical to past problems (hence, we are somewhat right they don’t happen again) but they’ll come sooner or later, whether we anticipate them or not.
Fire-fighters don’t solve problems. They fight them, mitigate them, and help us prevent them.
Likewise, we as supply chain managers don’t solve problems. As much as we may want to and spend much time trying to, we really do more fighting “fires,” mitigating them, and preparing for the next one.
Solving supply chain problems is the job of supply chain engineers. As supply chain managers work to fix problems to mitigate their adverse effects, supply chain engineers identify, define, and solve the problems.
Supply chain problems will always be there and won’t stop coming. We as supply chain managers don’t solve supply chain problems. We do quick fixes, stop them from getting worse, and try as much as possible to minimise the risks of disruptions.
Supply chain engineers solve supply chain problems. And the first step to solve supply chain problems is to recognise we need an engineer to do it, not a manager.
Ellery's Essays 