Every time I come across with a CEO / COO of any company, I see a tacit discontent with their Supply Chain performance written on their face. When I ask them about efforts being put on skills development of Supply Chain people by their companies, they draw a blank surface. "Yes, we send them for trainings", is the common answer.
Sending people for trainings is not same as developing skills. This holds true more for Supply Chain because of its vast overlap with many functions & far reaching impact. Skills development starts with assessment of Business & Supply Chain needs for today & future. This is then followed up defining various skills for different levels of positions, roles & responsibilities, linking it to the Key Result Areas for each. Next step is to get into detailed assessment of gaps in skills & performance for each individual in the Supply Chain. Only then the development plan can be worked out & training is just one of the way for development. There are many questions related to the kind of trainings e.g. whether customized or generic.
What makes the whole process complex is the lack of understanding of various supply chain skills, as they are not well defined. For example, is Demand Planning a skill for Sales or Supply Chain? Similarly, what role should be played by Supply Chain in product design or process design, is not clear to many. As a result, deliverable & skill gaps in Supply Chain are seen in a narrow context. In many cases, the effect experienced in the Supply Chain is caused by an event on which Supply Chain had no skills to influence. Companies keep beating around the outcome without understanding the cause & effect relationship.
Sending people for trainings is not same as developing skills. This holds true more for Supply Chain because of its vast overlap with many functions & far reaching impact. Skills development starts with assessment of Business & Supply Chain needs for today & future. This is then followed up defining various skills for different levels of positions, roles & responsibilities, linking it to the Key Result Areas for each. Next step is to get into detailed assessment of gaps in skills & performance for each individual in the Supply Chain. Only then the development plan can be worked out & training is just one of the way for development. There are many questions related to the kind of trainings e.g. whether customized or generic.
What makes the whole process complex is the lack of understanding of various supply chain skills, as they are not well defined. For example, is Demand Planning a skill for Sales or Supply Chain? Similarly, what role should be played by Supply Chain in product design or process design, is not clear to many. As a result, deliverable & skill gaps in Supply Chain are seen in a narrow context. In many cases, the effect experienced in the Supply Chain is caused by an event on which Supply Chain had no skills to influence. Companies keep beating around the outcome without understanding the cause & effect relationship.
Sending people to short term training courses or workshops is not an answer to address the skills gap. It can at best help to show your good intentions towards people development. The real training is a continuous process and has focused deliverable. It requires clear linkage with the real life situation & the job a person is handling. It focuses more on the addressing the cause, irrespective of the fact which part of organization it lies in.
In a nutshell, addressing the skills development in Supply Chain is a quite involved process and any simplistic approach could be counter productive. The ROI of hiring an expert over a long run could be very attractive.
Take a brief Survey on Supply Chain Skill Assessment.
2 comments:
Appreciate your thoughts Mr.Ashish!!
Supply chain in India is more generic terminology used without understanding the essence of it,i have seen organizations renaming their logistics or planning dept. to supply chain dept.this is just a new icing on old cake, unless there are clear KPIs'defined as correctly mentioned by you and unless people are accoutable for their mistakes things are going to be same.One more point you raised correctly was about training,i think change management plays a vital role too other than training, as in scm i consider self discipline, correct and seamless flow of information are two essential characteristics to make it a successful.It also depends on company's/organizations business stragegy,if stock out,delay and higher logistics cost are acceptable then there is hardly any scope of supply chain expert to exist.
Hi Ashish,
... "Sending people to short term training courses or workshops is not an answer to address the skills gap. It can at best help to show your good intentions towards people development." Agree to this, as training is important to inculcate knowledge to the work force, it is imperative that the organization has a clear assessment of how mature their organization are in terms of supply chain initiative readiness. Top Management must be able to identify the gaps within their functional organization and develop key strategies to move forward. Then skills development will follow based on identified skills gap. Cheers! Mark Salvador
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