Right Brain Trumps Left

We pretty much figured out the science of supply chain management; now it's time to take a look at the softer side of SCM as the main driver of progress.

By Nicholas J. LaHowchic -- Supply Chain Management Review, 4/1/2007

Ten years ago I wrote an article for Supply Chain Management Review on how to build a supply chain business within a product company. The world of supply chain management then was still emerging as a separate practice, fostered by many in the operations-related fields and supported by other parts of the business organization and channel partners. The efforts then were to forge a respected discipline that satisfied the needs of a company’s overall business strategy by complimenting product strategies with equally important marketable service strategies. While we always thought about how we partnered with our trading partners back then, there was less appreciation of what role culture played in building successful partnerships, businesses, and organizations globally. Further, in seeking to transform data into information, we thought and operated sequentially across processes and geographies. But all that has changed.

The single biggest challenge today and in the future for supply chain managers is to properly appreciate and incorporate culture—more so than process—into supply chain solutions within and across trading partners. The science, or left brain side, of SCM has excelled over the past ten years. Relying on the left brain, we’ve been able to understand how a fully integrated business works, how the value chain is created, how demand/supply chain networks function. This awareness has resulted in the establishment of more permanent horizontally based business teams in many companies. These teams are still expected to be functionally competent, but now also must work (and at times play) together under a new internal and external business model with new demands and nuances.

Today and in the future, I believe that the soft skills, or right brain side, of SCM will surpass science as the driver of needed changes and outcomes. In fact, I believe culture eats strategy and processes for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Culture needs to be a foundation to foster insights that affect behavior and habits that, in turn, will produce new and better supply chain results.

Our single biggest opportunity going forward has to be active real-time ubiquitous information across the supply chain. To capitalize on this information, we need to re-engineer our mental models—our right brain thinking. Today and even more so in the future, information on the entire supply chain’s performance and status will be continually available. Working with broader and better holistic business intelligence across our supply chains (as opposed to relying solely on sequential information) allows us to better adjust, advance, and adapt all facets of our operations to achieve a better result for the consumer. We must stop trying to do the same old things faster and start performing different, more intelligent parallel actions in more collaborative ways. Achieving this will greatly improve the overall performance and effectiveness of the supply chain organization.

Focusing on culture and information intelligence with more formal horizontal multi-functional goal-based teams is a paradigm shift needed for business. Interestingly, this already is the norm in many other vocations. Maybe it’s time to take a lesson from team sports like football or basketball where players are primarily organized by offense and defense not functional position. They play as a team and work off a single playbook with real-time options as a constant. It’s time we start moving to new business architecture, practices, and sensibility.