Supply chains are big, long, comprehensive, and complicated. Managing them means dealing with multiple customers, vendors & service providers. We buy and deliver from and to distant places or just next-door. We sell many types of products and handle much more in raw & packaging materials and in-process inventories. We move merchandise via elaborate sea, land, and air transport networks.
We encounter so many problems with supply chains, which if we solve, lead to huge benefits, but if left unsolved, cause costly setbacks to our organisations.
We’re realising that supply chain management by itself is no longer sufficient in solving operational problems. As much as we have been lured by digital information technologies, cutting-edge automation, and buzzword concepts like Just-in-Time, Lean, & Six Sigma, we have not been made significant strides in improving the productivities of our supply chains. We have even forgotten about productivity itself as fickle domestic & international trade policies, increasing industrial labour strife, and divisive political & social activism distract us in our management of supply chains.
We maintain short-term relationships with partners (i.e., vendors, service providers, and customers), instead of working with them toward long-term ones. We rationalise that it’s hard to peg lasting relationships with partners because our enterprise strategies & portfolios are constantly evolving. Products change, our needs change, and our operations change, so how can we develop lasting relationships with our partners? We can’t figure out how our supply chains should be set up because we don’t know what the situation will be like tomorrow.
We’re not getting the results we want and many of us don’t have a clear idea of what we want in the first place. We’re more reactive than proactive when it comes to managing supply chains. There are too many day-to-day things to address or worse, there are burning platforms, that are overwhelming and keeping us from taking the initiative to improve our operations.
So, what should we do? How do we get the upper hand over our supply chains such that we can manage them to be better?
Answer: we rebuild them. We rebuild supply chains to what we want them to be. Better, more productive, and beneficial to all, that is, we and our partners.
Building better supply chains is not the same as constructing new facilities or inventing new machines. Supply chains are intangible. Even though they have tangible components like transportation vehicles, production lines, storage facilities, & material handling equipment, these components taken together, as in a series of connected operations, are not readily perceptible.
We as individuals view supply chains differently. What one enterprise executive sees would not be the same as what another perceives. It is a challenge therefore for stakeholders (i.e., enterprises, suppliers, customers) to have shared points of view of their supply chains.
Building supply chains, therefore, requires collaboration among partners. Collaboration begins with alignment towards a vision, in which we agree to a single set of supply chain objectives. The very first step to building supply chains is, therefore, envisioning.
Envisioning is not the same as the visioning activity many organisations do via their teambuilding sessions. Teambuilding sessions are often activities where organisations aim to foster employee camaraderie and morale. From experience, many so-called visions from these teambuilding sessions fall flat; they never make it as seriously pursued work goals that go beyond the fancy posters on bulletin boards. Employees in many firms go back to what they were doing as soon as they walk into their workplaces and face the hard realities of their jobs.
Envisioning would also not apply for entrepreneurs who are just starting up or who are struggling to survive. It doesn’t make sense to envision when survival is the immediate goal. Most successful entrepreneurs have clear & set dreams when they begin their businesses; envisioning just after we commence business wouldn’t therefore be logical.
Envisioning is an activity in which we and our supply chain partners work together to visualise a mutually beneficial future state. We and our partners develop and deliberate on what we imagine would be our ideal supply chains, ones in which everyone would stand to benefit from in productivity and in achievement of shared goals.
It is not about one (1) individual’s or enterprise’s vision but one that is shared among partners, in which we all are active stakeholders in the enterprises that make up our supply chains. Every partner should therefore contribute to the task of envisioning.
We face many challenges with our supply chains. So much so, that we should consider rebuilding them to be better. The first thing we need to do when building our supply chains is to work with our partners to envision a common future state for our supply chains.
If we can establish something in common to shoot for, it would be a big first step as we and our partners seize the initiative in rebuilding our supply chains.
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