The Supply Chain Oscars

In all my years running the Supply Chain Top 25 for AMR Research and Gartner, the one thing I heard most consistently about why people cared was that the ranking reflected the opinions of their peers. Validation within one’s own professional community, it seems, is the highest praise available. Supply chain practitioners in this respect are no different from film stars, directors and cinematographers.

Where the Top 25 falls down a bit, however, is in its over-reliance on quantitative measures that convey an appearance of hard objectivity, but in practice distract from what should be the main purpose of an awards programme – namely, to elevate examples of excellence for all to emulate.

Apple, the number one ranked company year after year, although certainly an exemplar in supply chain terms, is not really holding up its end of the bargain because it refuses to share.

How can we learn from the best if they won’t teach?

Best Picture

When The Godfather took the Oscar for “Best Picture” back in 1973, it did more than just win; it set an example that still influences artists to this day. The fact that Deliverance was also a nominee that year but lost says plenty about the breadth of creative excellence in the film community.

The same can be said of 1977 when Rocky won the Oscar, but Taxi Driver missed out. The common thread here is that recognised excellence delivers breakthrough innovation for all to learn from.

In the world of supply chain these breakthroughs increasingly come in the form of strategic initiatives that alter the playing field for business by changing the way operations affect competitiveness in the marketplace.

Clorox’s segmentation strategy, for instance, enables responsiveness and rapid product development in slices of the market like food containers to coexist with low-cost value chains for trash bags that terminate six inches apart on the same grocery shelf.

Or consider Google, whose approach to programme management in the data centre supply chain is heavily vertically integrated and yet diversified in terms of energy, componentry and even real estate portfolios. The strategy delivers the best of a risk diversified asset base within a deeply engineered high-performance system.

And anyone who saw Hans Van Alebeek of Nike present at our Leaders Forum in Gleneagles last year on the sophisticated combination of postponement strategies and S&OP process innovation that support its NFL apparel business would surely have to consider this a worthy award contender.

Such breakthroughs move the needle for all of us by challenging conventional wisdoms with winning formulae. Clorox showed that low-cost and rapid innovation can be delivered in the same CPG supply chain. Google showed that cheap, off-the-shelf servers are not the best way to build high-performing, cost-efficient data centres. Nike showed that long lead times in fabric need not hamstring a quick-turn supply chain that sells 10 times more jerseys for the MVP than it does for the average football player.

Lessons learned from such breakthrough performance is the big prize awaiting a community prepared to formally recognise its best.

Power of the Profession Awards

With these goals in mind, and recognising also the real-world impact of supply chains on such vital global challenges as health, hunger and environmental sustainability, we at SCM World have initiated a new programme called the Power of the Profession Awards.

The programme will work a bit like the Oscars with nominees selected from the widest possible universe of supply chain breakthroughs, identifying specific cases of excellence rather than relying on a quantitative formula.

Our focus in the inaugural year is on supply chain strategy and supply chain talent development, with the expectation of more categories for recognition in the future.

Nominees will be judged in three stages:

1. The SCM World research team, led by Dr Hau Lee, will filter initial nominations.
2. Semi-finalists will then have their submissions voted on by the 20,000-plus practitioners in the SCM World community to produce a list of finalists.
3. These finalists will then be judged by board-level supply chain executives from 50 companies – including respected names like P&G, Unilever, Burberry, Chevron, Cisco, Schneider Electric, Nestlé, Intel and Under Armour – together with seven hand-picked academics from universities including Eindhoven University of Technology, the Otto Beisheim School of Management at WHU, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and Stanford University.

Our mission at SCM World is about accelerated learning for supply chain professionals. I sincerely believe this programme will steepen the learning curve and encourage you to participate.