Horrible Deaths In Supply Chain Management

Those whose heads are elsewhere might think immediately of music when someone mentions Trampled By Turtles. They would be correct, and this very fine band's new release, Wild Animals, is well worth taking a listen.

In our workaday world, though, a supply chain leader's demise is more likely to come at the feet of a horde of hard-shelled amphibians than from the sudden onslaught of a rampaging bull elephant. Sure, the unplanned-for flood can put someone out of business, as can a random lightning strike on an unprotected facility.

The more likely scenario, though, is one of incessant and unrelenting trampling of little feet, ultimately resulting in madness and career flight, or an agonizing descent into apathy and and arrested personal growth. Face it, we are confronted with a myriad of little things that go wrong, or take precedence over plans and what we thought were reasonable priorities.

We face far more trucks that are late than we do container ships that sink. The scheduled workforce will show up, but maybe not in quite the numbers we need. Suppliers will ship the right number of products, but perhaps not in the colors, sizes, flavors, or assortment that we ordered. Or, demand profiles might have shifted, and the once-appropriate order no longer meets what the market demands.

Perhaps the budget we were given to start the year is "no longer operative", as politicians like to say - and we can't commit to the technology upgrade that will allow us to meet throughput targets (which, curiously, are still operative).

Our best engineer has been re-asigned to a, in someone's mind, higher priority project. We can't work on continuous improvement initiatives because staff resources are running a year behind on the corporate ERP implementation. And on and on . . .

It is a death by a thousand cuts; it is being trampled by turtles. When an organization is headed by a real leader, though, that leader understands how to divert the turtles' attentions. When the boss is not a leader, the turtles are likely to feel empowered, though.

You've got choices. Find a workplace with a low tolerance for turtles. Take the lead in fighting off the turtles where you are. Or, put in the earbuds and ignore the pitter-patter of thousands of little feet.