The Social Side of Supply Chain Management

This is an excerpt of the original article. It was written for the July-August 2013 edition of Supply Chain Management Review. The full article is available to current subscribers.

July-August 2013

How do you extend the frontiers of supply management excellence and build a solid competitive advantage? Answers to this pivotal question emerged from an Executive Summit of supply chain leaders convened recently at Michigan State University. The four companies profiled here, all participants in that summit, have adopted principles that promote excellence and continue to expand that frontier.

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In 1996, when I was a young engineer working at Motorola, there were only a handful of employees—in a few hand-picked departments—who were allowed access to the Internet and external websites from their work computers. I was not one of them, so I had to sneak to my friend’s cubicle after work hours to surf the Internet. (I was living in Arizona at the time and searching for a job back east, and my dial-up connection at home was painfully slow).

Motorola, like many companies back then, was treading very carefully and slowly toward the Internet era. The company feared that employee productivity would drop significantly if everyone were given access to the Web. Managers were concerned that everybody would be wasting hours surfing the Internet instead of working. Motorola also worried about having to deal with a whole new set of HR issues if employees started visiting “inappropriate” (read: pornographic) websites.

Other companies at the time were equally cautious and fearful. One supply chain executive, for example, told me at a workshop last summer that his company required employees to fill out a permission form if they wanted to email somebody outside the company.

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