It happens all the time.
We go to an off-site strategic planning session (or a seminar or workshop), bond with colleagues in teambuilding exercises, creatively come up with new ideas, and commit to action plans to implement them.
As soon as we return to our workplaces, we go back to doing what we have always been doing. We respond to requests that have piled up on our inboxes and we catch up on tasks because we have deadlines to meet. Some of us may try to implement some of those action plans we committed to, but sooner or later, they fall by the wayside because we have other more important things our bosses tell us to do. It’s as if we never left; that off-site experience seemed just a dream.
The first step to building supply chains is envisioning. We, who are enterprise professionals, stakeholders, and our partners formulate a future supply chain state we all agree we want to attain.
Envisioning requires collaboration which involves both the sharing of information & ideas, and negotiation. We put forth varying positions on what each of us believes what our supply chains should be like and what they should deliver. The hard part would be marrying our and their positions into one agreed vision for a future supply chain state. We spend time & energy listening, conversing, & convincing as we iron out differences and understand each other’s opinions. We give and take until we arrive to a consensus.
When we and our partners finally settle on a common vision for our supply chains, we celebrate. A common vision among supply chain partners would be a significant achievement, a feat which many enterprises have not pulled off. It may even be a first time for whatever industry we are in, thereby a triumph which could lead to breakthrough results.
Excited as we may be about what we envisioned, we wonder if we could really achieve that vision we and our partners just hammered out. Is our vision going to be just like those ideas we committed to in the last off-site strategic planning session we went to? Is it just another dream that disintegrates as soon as we wake up to our supply chain realities?
We can all be fired up to implement new concepts in our operations only to see them immediately fail as soon as we run into adversities. For example, we may want to start using statistical control charts to monitor materials as they transform to finished goods. We assign & orient operators to update the charts at their respective workplaces. After a few days, the charts are no more. The operators didn’t appreciate the value of the control charts as they complained they had no time to measure samples and graph them. Vendors and customers didn’t see the relevance of the control charts to their own quality parameters. And finally, our bosses didn’t care for them even though they signed off on using the charts in that last off-site strategic planning session.
Envisioning a future state can be exciting. But the excitement easily extinguishes as soon as we come back to reality. Hence, to proceed with the building of our supply chains, we need to undertake the next step after envisioning: the reality check.
To build a supply chain, we must not only have a clear vision of the future systems & structures we are aiming for, we also must see visibly what we currently have and are doing. We can’t proceed to our destination without knowing where we’re starting from.
In the reality check, or what some of us may formally call the diagnostic assessment, we lay out and examine the details of our present-day operations. We map activities, draw the structures of our organisations & relationships, tabulate operating prerequisites, gather & graph performance information, and lay out facility & flow diagrams.
The purpose of the reality check is twofold:
- It’s to understand what we’re doing and find out where we are today.
- It’s to identify the gaps between our present state and future state.
A reality check is an exercise in evaluation. We make visible the systems & structures and gauge the performance of our supply chain operations. It’s essentially showing a mirror of one’s operations to stakeholders.
Reality checks are not meant to be springboards to quick-fix solutions, even though we may immediately find offhand obvious ones as we examine our supply chains.
We use reality checks to compare our present supply chain states to the future state vision we and our partners formulated. We not only gain insight about what and how our supply chains are doing but also explore how far we need to go & how much we need to do. In short, we identify the gaps.
It’s nice to dream, to conjure a future state which would be better than what we presently are in.
But our dream clouds go “poof!” as soon as they collide with realities.
Supply chain realities give us no respite. As soon as we form a collaborated vision with our colleagues & partners, we should do a reality check or formally, a diagnosis of our present-day supply chain operations.
When we make visible our supply chains operations and their performances, we can assess where we are today and comprehend the gaps between our supply chains today and our visions for them.
Ellery's Essays 
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