The Resolute Benchmarker: Kate Vitasek

"How can we not give supply chain practitioners a tool that helps them say whether they’re bad or good at what they do?"

That was the challenge that Kate Vitasek threw out a few years ago to her fellow board members at the Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals (CSCMP). Vitasek, an inveterate campaigner for supply chain performance measurement and management, argued forcefully that the profession urgently needed standards for its processes.

At first CSCMP’s research committee voted down the idea. But Vitasek would not be deterred, and her reasoning won out. She and a group of colleagues went on to literally write the book on supply chain management process standards. Drawing on the insights of 50 or so experts across the U.S., they compiled the CSCMP book—the first set of reference documents whose guidelines help supply chain leaders self-assess their organizations’ current processes. The tools help identify process strengths and weaknesses and focus attention on areas where improvement efforts will drive the most benefit.

That’s just part of what Vitasek has contributed to the profession. She and her colleagues at Supply Chain Visions—the strategy and education consultancy she founded in 2002—have also authored the "Warehouse Manager’s Guide to Benchmarking" for the Warehouse Education and Research Council (WERC) as well as WERC’s Warehousing and Fulfillment Process Benchmark and Best Practices Guide. And they donated their time to provide a glossary of logistics terms for CSCMP—a regularly updated listing that also appears on Forbes.com.

"I’m proud what we’ve done to lead the profession in developing some of the most practical and easy-to-use tools available for benchmarking today," says Vitasek. "The free glossary is the single most downloaded thing on CSCMP’s site. Anyone who does not know our profession’s terminology now has a free resource that that my firm volunteered to compile."

Vitasek has other platforms with which to preach the gospels of performance management and the implementation of metrics. She is also a faculty member for the University of Tennessee’s Center for Executive Education and she teaches MBA classes on performance management and lean supply chains for Wright State University. She developed and teaches seminars for WERC. And she also finds time to be on the peer review board for the Journal of Business Logistics.

"Challenge" ought to be Vitasek’s middle name. "I remember being told I was bossy when I was a kid," she smiles. "I think that being bossy was a way of getting others to get on board with my goals! I guess I’m still bossy because I still like to tell people where I’m going—but thankfully I’ve found better ways to communicate and recruit others besides telling them what to do!"

In college at the University of Tennessee, her talents for challenging and communicating were recognized. She won three Chancellor’s Citations in her senior year—one for leadership, one for academics, and one for leading the student chapter of the American Marketing Association to second place among universities nationwide. She graduated with a B.S. in marketing, and went on to graduate summa cum laude with an MBA in logistics, also from Tennessee. One of her strongest influencers at the time was Dr. John Langley, not only as an academic but as a model for how to lead. "He was president of CSCMP then. He went around the country teaching companies how to do things better," she says. "I remember thinking that’s it—I want to do that."

In the workplace, Vitasek put what she’d learned to good use as a supply chain practitioner, serving in a range of marketing, operations, and general management roles at companies that included Procter & Gamble, Kroger, Accenture’s logistics strategy practice, Microsoft, and Modus Media International, a global third-party logistics provider.

But Vitasek’s sweet spot is benchmarking—specifically, performance measurement and management. She has given more than 100 speeches to industry groups and universities on those topics, and authored over 75 articles which have appeared in publications such as Journal of Business Logistics, Supply Chain Management Review, Aviation Week, Distribution Business Management Journal, The Manufacturer, and APICS Performance Advantage.

As a consultant, Ms. Vitasek brings a unique blend of consulting, practitioner and general management experience to the organizations she works with. Her firm’s philosophy is to "teach a company to fish" rather than to present findings that languish in vinyl binders or to implement change from the outside.

Vitasek cites as an early influence the classic she read in college: Max Dupree’s The Art of Leadership. She still uses it as a reference. No surprise, then, that she is crystal-clear about what the term "leadership" means. "It’s being able to see a goal, comprehend what is needed to get there, and describe to others a path to the goal," she says. "Then, having described the path, the leader must be able to communicate it to others in a way that generates enthusiasm and a desire to follow."

That describes her own participative approach as a leader of bright, experienced, creative professionals. "I like to create the vision and work with my team to develop a plan to achieve it—and then let the team use their abilities to get the job done," she says. She cites the value of what she describes as a "what’s in it for we" mentality. Too much oversight is a sign of poor leadership, she says. "If you’ve hired the right people, you’re leading them in the right direction, and they’re motivated to achieve mutual success, you should not have to micromanage them."

Vitasek is equally explicit about a leader’s obligation to look long-term. "Today’s workforce is stuck in an activity trap—heads-down, going to work every day, doing the same things they’ve done every day. A good leader will get people out of the activity trap and challenge them to get to focus on outcomes, not activities," she says. That leader will have the courage to manage for the long term despite the constant pressure to focus on short-term priorities.

And Vitasek would not be Vitasek if she did not mention the importance of having those outcomes be measurable. "Many people think I am a measurement nut," she says. "How else will you and the others on your team know if you are being successful? Having measurable success targets brings sharpness to your vision."

Asked about where today’s supply chain managers still need to step up as leaders, she highlights a paucity of people skills. She contends that the soft skills of communication, motivation and empathy are far more important than the hard skills of supply chain leadership.

So what is Vitasek focusing on now? You cannot take the challenge out of the challenger. She recently urged the CSCMP to simply give away rather than continue selling the process benchmarking standards that she and her team had developed—so the benchmarks would be freely available to everyone in the profession.

Vitasek has always been her own fiercest challenger. She recalls day-dreaming through seventh-grade algebra class about being a business leader—a goal she had achieved by her late twenties. These days, her stated purpose in life is to educate people so effectively that they achieve levels of performance never realized before. Today, the challenge she’s setting for herself is to have the theme of her new book, Vested Outsourcing, be as influential a decade from now as the Lean and Six Sigma philosophies have become.

It’s a fair bet that Kate Vitasek is already working up some handy metrics to gauge her progress toward that goal. "I try to have quantifiable goals for just about everything," she says.

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