APICS + SCOR = Masters in Supply Chain

An important merger in the world of non-profit professional associations was announced this week as APICS and the Supply Chain Council agreed to combine efforts. As a former APICS director-at-large myself, I think this is good news for industry and the profession. APICS’ 37,000+ members and widely recognised professional certifications CPIM (Certified in Production and Inventory Management) and CSCP (Certified Supply Chain Professional) will now be melded with the Supply Chain Council’s near ubiquitous Supply Chain Operations Reference (SCOR) model. The end game is a cleaner path to the top for the next generation of supply chain leaders.

Alphabet soup

We recently published a report listing the top universities and associations offering supply chain education. The lists were based on nothing more ambitious than asking hundreds of professionals to name their top three brands as “markers of talent”. APICS took the association category by a mile, while the Supply Chain Council came second. If this were a case of the top two grocery retailers merging, we might expect customer or regulator objections, but in this situation, customers win.

Certifications abound when associations form to crystallise emerging ideas into standards. During the early phases of development, this is a natural and positive surge of innovation. As ideas mature and consolidate, however, further growth depends on someone locking down a monopoly. No one wants a confusing array of acronyms cluttering up the CVs of potential hires. Supply chain as a discipline is in this consolidation phase now.

Supply chain as business strategy

The whole idea of supply chain as a professional discipline akin to finance or marketing is little more than two decades old. Before the 1990s, people working on the flow of materials from source to customer generally saw themselves as experts in one of several precursor functions like purchasing, logistics or production. Huge changes in the structure of business wrought first by globalisation and then accelerated by internet connectivity have melted these functional distinctions into what we now know as supply chain.

The Supply Chain Council was formed in 1996 by Pittiglio Rabin Todd & McGrath (PRTM), a specialist consultancy, and AMR Research, an analyst firm. The charter members of the Council were corporate leaders whose intent was to define a process model in simple English language words explaining how stuff gets from raw material to consumers. The resulting “plan-source-make-deliver” mantra at the top of the SCOR model is now known worldwide.

APICS, a professional association for supply chain and operations management, has been around far longer. It has traditionally been concerned with professional training in inventory and production control. This has been very successful for identifying solid technical skills, but less useful as a basis for strategic leverage of supply chain as a competitive weapon in the marketplace. One result of this heritage is a solid financial and organisational base among individual practitioners. Another, however, is less intellectual traction at the board level.

Combining these two players brings 500 or so corporate members of the Supply Chain Council together with thousands of certified working professionals under the APICS umbrella to offer a talent development ecosystem able to offer skill certification in a strategic context. APICS CEO Abe Eshkanazi cites DuPont, Intel, Coca-Cola, Caterpillar and BASF as key contributors to the momentum for the merger. From my perspective, the breadth and depth of these companies’ supply chain leadership lends great credibility to the marriage.

The future

Talent development in supply chain remains a hot topic among SCM World members. I am regularly fielding requests for recommendations of potential candidates who know the basics but can also rise to meet their counterparts in sales, engineering or finance on a level playing field. APICS and the Supply Chain Council have many of the ingredients needed to professionalise this emerging career path.

Looking ahead, it seems collaboration with other associations like the Institute for Supply Management (ISM) or the Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals (CSCMP) could make sense. The ISM, in particular, brings an element that could help with its widely followed Purchasing Managers’ Index (PMI), materially impacting Wall Street for many years now. Adding a general business press edge to the mix could thrust supply chain even clearly more into the spotlight.

Board-level visibility is on the horizon.