Committee to Help Define Supply Chain Management Through Survey

Sean Murphy, Associate Editor -- Supply Chain Management Review, 2/18/2008

A corporate consortium is co-sponsoring an initiative beginning today to gather information on the state of supply chain management education and supply chain talent in the field.

The Global Supply Chain Professional Development Committee, together with AMR Research, has developed an online, in-depth survey designed to identify what sorts of supply chain-related skills are most useful to employers right now, according to Jake Barr, director of manufacturing, planning and logistics for Procter & Gamble, a member company of the committee.

The survey also aims to better clarify what standards best define "supply chain" educational programs, and what schools are providing the most supply chain management grads, Barr said, though he hastened to add the survey does not plan to “rank” schools.

Barr said the lack of highly-skilled supply chain managers in the field was initially prompting companies like Procter & Gamble, Intel, Boeing and IBM to conduct their own private research to find out why.

“We weren’t getting the quality of graduates that we needed,” he said.

The companies, which were already members of The Global Supply Chain Professional Development Committee, eventually decided to combine their efforts to come up with an answer, for the good of the corporate community, Barr said.

In time, the committee discovered the gap in supply chain skills was a sign that the trend of “supply chain management” is no longer a novel concept. Now, Barr said, the demand is shifting from the mere presence of supply chain managers to executives qualified to define a company’s supply chain and make sure it keeps up with the changing business world.

Dave Aquino, research director at AMR Research’s Value Chain Strategies Group, is helping to develop the survey, which he said will help identify what qualifications supply chain managers in specific industries need to have.

“The [supply chain] industry, as it’s been evolving, we haven’t done a great job of clarifying what those qualifications are,” he said.

Aquino said the survey will ask, among other things:

• What is the current span of control that supply chain leaders are responsible for managing? Is it growing or contracting?
• Are there specific functional predispositions that organizations are trying to acquire talent to support?
• What targeted supply chain competency areas are current or future priorities, gaps or concerns?
• Which universities are organizations using to acquire talent? What is the quality and depth of the talent given the competency requirements?

Barr said over 300 corporations in seven different industries have expressed interest in taking the survey. Aquino said the survey will remain open for about three weeks. Once the results are available, AMR and the committee plan to also release all the results into the public domain. Barr said neither Procter & Gamble nor any other company wants to "own" the research, only to share it with others for the good of the supply chain community. “Our interest in doing this is to bring focus to the issue,” he said.