How to hack your supply chain: Breaking today, building tomorrow

From the January-February 2024 edition of Supply Chain Management Review.

January-February 2024

Back in 2019, we seemed on a consistent path to the future. Then COVID-19 arrived on the global scene, and all predictions went out the window. As 2024 begins, everyone wants to know what the year will look like. I…

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“In war, only the simple succeeds.”  – Paul von Hindenburg, president of Germany’s Weimar Republic

You can buy or build all the technology you want and mandate all the cybersecurity and digital training in the world, but unless you have digitally savvy leaders, your efforts to secure your supply chain and make it more resilient will fall flat. This leadership change entails challenging our narratives about users and boosting the adoption of digital tools. Most business leaders don’t truly understand the power and impact of digital. If they did, they would recognize it as an existential threat and also a growth opportunity. Instead, many organizations remain stuck doing things as they’ve always done. This isn’t necessarily bad, but it becomes problematic when trying to change the enterprise and initiate a digital-first way of operating.

The digital upskilling of people can change an organization’s trajectory. Yet, it’s often distilled to the minimum: taking some learning management courses and doing a big system upgrade and/or consolidation. What’s more, digital transformations are often big and complicated, so there are great opportunities for poor performers to hide. Even worse, they can be active blockers to success. Or you will see employees adopt the language du jour to protect themselves. (For instance, the person who once built reports is now a “data scientist,” which is nonsense.)

The scope is a huge issue as well. Often, digital transformations are too big to manage, with leaders wrongly focused on activity, not productivity. A big digital transformation requires an agile way of working to increase success and limit risk. So why is the transformation itself a complicated and monolithic waterfall that’s almost guaranteed to lead to failure? (I blame executive desires for a big bang and consultants for perpetuating this.) Most digital transformations are too reliant on storytelling and promoting. The “why” is usually well-articulated, but the “what” and “how” are always missing.

Disrupting the deficit perspective

There’s something so gratifying about studying a particular topic and discovering new patterns. As I started traveling after the pandemic, I noticed significantly more digital competency and maturity within organizations. That made sense. However, I was surprised to hear nearly every analyst/consultant/solution provider say procurement was broken. I heard the following over and over:

Procurement …

• “has no real control over the category, is remote from every purchase and has no analytics or insights to effect change or improvements.”
• “continues to run many activities manually, using traditional technology.”
• “has no visibility into spend.”
• “is backward-looking reporting; there’s no forecasting.”
• “struggles to be influential in business decisions.”

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