Barrier Buster: Dee Biggs
By John Kerr -- Supply Chain Management Review, 4/1/2007
 Dee Biggs |
The collaborative talk is paying off. Last year, for the first time, GMA and FMI held their logistics distribution conferences at the same location and time, strengthening the links by sharing a joint reception event and several general conference sessions. This year, the two groups are doing it again. “It's not about their supply chain—the other side's supply chain,” says Biggs. “It's about our supply chain.”
A History of Teamwork
This focus on teamwork extends back to Biggs' childhood, when he played most of the sports then available to boys. “I was a pretty focused kid—almost obsessive,” he recalls. “I played baseball, football, basketball, but I was never particularly good at any of them. But one of the things you learn from being on a high school football team is that being a good teammate is critical.”
Graduating with a civil engineering degree from Virginia Military Institute in 1968, Biggs became a U.S. Army infantry officer and a 24-year-old platoon leader in Vietnam. “Developing a sense of team—that's critically important to building a platoon. Everybody's got to do their job or else they put their colleagues at risk,” he says. Learning from his platoon sergeant and others, Biggs quickly picked up the importance of remaining focused on the task at hand and on staying calm in the most adverse circumstances—in jungle firefights. “Those experiences played a big role in what my management style ended up being,” he recalls.
After earning his MBA from Rochester Institute of Technology, Biggs began work as a distribution analyst at Mobil Oil's plastics division. Three years later, he moved to Maryland Cup—part of the Sweetheart beverage container business—starting as a facilities planning manager and then taking on a distribution planning management role. In 1978, he went to work for juice and jelly maker Welch's, with his first job being manager of distribution planning.
Making His Presence Felt
The new recruit quickly made his presence felt. He started the company's first retailer customer service department, justifying the new unit with a study showing why it was important to centralize the management of orders coming from grocery stores' wholesalers, distribution centers, and convenience stores. Two years later, Biggs' group took on responsibility for physical distribution—specifically warehousing and transportation. A year or two after that, his team absorbed the company's purchasing and inventory management activities.
Biggs got even more serious about barrier-busting after moving the logistics group from New York to Welch's headquarters in the Boston area in 1992. He already had close connections with industry luminaries such as Joe Andraski, then at Nabisco, and they would regularly knock around new concepts for improving business processes. “We got the bright idea of blowing up our idea of customer service and going to order-to-cash,” he recalls.
In the old model, the customer service unit managed the relationships with big retailers such as Kroger and Publix and their distribution centers. But Biggs, now director of logistics, saw more value in managing all distribution activities in an end-to-end fashion, whether it involved decisions about trucking routes or cash transfer. Implemented by 1994, Welch's organization model soon became the industry norm. The benefits to retailers appeared quickly. On-time delivery rates started to improve, and communication picked up significantly. “If out-of-stocks were likely, we could let them know earlier,” says Biggs.
The new model made a big difference inside Welch's too. “It broke down all the walls—we were one big team. Instead of having different units with different goals, we had one common theme,” says the logistics chief. New goals and objectives were put in place for the team. For the first few years, the incentives worked on an “all or nothing” basis—everybody in Welch's logistics operations would win, or nobody would. Teamwork was essential.
At about that time, Biggs was also ratcheting up his contributions to the supply chain profession as a whole. He became vice president of the New York State Food Processors and was president of the Western New York and Baltimore/ Washington Roundtables of the Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals (CSCMP.) He also was the chair of the GMA's Logistics Committee for eight years and a member of the joint industry Best Practice Committee on Continuous Replenishment. And he found time to teach, delivering an evening course in physical distribution management at the University of Baltimore. “It was an opportunity to pass on some things I'd learned,” he says. 
Seven years ago, his involvement with his industry's key trade groups led him to question the limits of the relationship between GMA and FMI. Each held an annual conference, and each conference was notable for the conspicuous absence of representatives from the “other side” of the industry. So Biggs and others met to discuss ways in which they could meld their efforts in a bid to recognize the entirety of the supply chain shared by the producers, distributors and retailers. “This year, we're going to be together on three mornings,” notes Biggs. The link-up hadn't been easy to achieve: just getting the key decision makers to come to the same table at the same time had been a labor all by itself.
Redefining “Perfect”
Biggs' emphasis has always been on the whole supply chain. Part of that emphasis is evident today in the push to redefine “perfect order” metrics—a topic on which Biggs and several of his retail sector colleagues presented at CSCMP's 2006 annual conference.
Established about seven years ago, the metrics that now define the perfect order are getting an update. (Perfect order fulfillment is defined as the performance of the supply chain in delivering the correct product to the correct customer and place at the correct time in the correct condition, in the right quantity and package, and with the correct documentation and invoice.) Working on a new task force with colleagues from other producers such as Pfizer and Land O' Lakes and from grocery stores such as Meijer and Wegmans, Biggs is overhauling the metrics that are critical to the success of their shared supply chain.
The metrics used until recently covered orders shipped complete, on-time delivery, accurate and timely invoicing, and no damage. But they have not been able to account for, say, hidden damage to a shipment or a deduction for a noninvoiceable item such as a late delivery. So the task force has proposed more rigorous metrics that include criteria such as cases shipped vs. ordered, data synchronization, days of supply, order cycle times, and damage (defined as unsaleables.)
As a result, Welch's and Wegmans have begun a collaborative scorecarding project to track performance against the new metrics. One key outcome: As with on-time delivery, Biggs and his counterpart at Wegmans found they had two different views of order cycle time. Orders were being picked up on Wednesday, but in some cases, they were not being delivered until Monday, causing the order cycle time to be artificially higher than it should have been. The dashboard allowed the producer and grocer to share files and find the underlying reason for the difference in order cycle times. The new metrics are rippling out to other industry players. Kroger, for example, is applying some of them to good effect. “Slowly but surely, the elements of the new metrics are catching on,” says Biggs.
Today, Dee Biggs is the director of customer logistics—a strategic role that sees him on the road interacting closely with nine strategic accounts including Wegmans, Kroger, Wal-Mart, Publix, and Safeway. Still deeply committed to dialog and collaboration across the industry, he is currently on CSCMP's board of directors. And he keeps his hand in teaching, albeit at a very different level. Having established so many wins for Welch's and for the supply chain profession, Biggs now has to encourage his team to take it to the hoop: He coaches youth basketball to his town's fifth graders.
You can be sure he's teaching the kids as much about teamwork and collaboration as he's coaching them in how to distribute the ball.
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