Are We On-Boarded Yet?

Please enjoy the thoughts and musings of our friend, supporter, and long-time contributor Art van Bodegraven Jr., who passed away on June 18, 2017. Art was a prolific writer and had amassed a collection of unpublished blog posts he had planned to run well into the future. To honor his memory, we will continue to post these remaining blogs as he had intended. If you’ve been a fan of The Art of Art blog, check out our tribute.

 

On-boarding is yet another lip-service task that tends to fall short as new hires integrate into enterprises.  Somewhat like a new President, who pledges to acomplish miracles and fulfill campaign promises in the first one hundred days, we tend to think that we've finished the process at 100 days, and can move on to the next task.

Surprise, pizza party-breath!  You've only just begun.  And, the process(es) involved in SCM are mission-critical, given the constant changes in products, customers, channels, and designs>

One leadership guru promotes this 100-day action plan: Keep Going.  Keep Building.  Begin the process of continual evolution.  This three-step plan must span three critical areas.

Leadership: Gain feedback, and sharpen skills.  Figure out how to be more effective as teams and as an organization.

Practices: Design and evolve, based on changes in manifold dimensions, including circumstances.  Decide how and where to redeploy plans, tracking, and program management.

Culture: After 100 days your cultural insights are more insightful.  You are more clear about where and how you need to evolve the culture.  Close the gaps, and design an actionable plan for competitive advantage.

These Big Three, though, keep on going.  As you evolve processes, elements of what must continue beyond 100 days, continue in perpetuity, include prioritized attention to:

• Your Leadership, and its improvement
• People; development, talent acquisition, succession and contingency planning
• Plans, startegic reviews and refreshes
• Practices, business reviews, plan and milestone updates
• Program management, to leverage organizational capabulity and capacity
• Culture, contuing to redefine and close gaps
• Surprises, dealing with unexpected change, assessing degree and length of impact

The best-laid plans . . . The need to adjust and take decision on the fly is inevitable.

So, work on change-making with insufficient data - and deal with it.

 

Settle For Less Than You'd Hoped, And Be Happier For It

Please enjoy the thoughts and musings of our friend, supporter, and long-time contributor Art van Bodegraven Jr., who passed away on June 18, 2017. Art was a prolific writer and had amassed a collection of unpublished blog posts he had planned to run well into the future. To honor his memory, we will continue to post these remaining blogs as he had intended. If you’ve been a fan of The Art of Art blog, check out our tribute.

 

Why and when to settle for less than your hopes and dreams . . . As the corporate ladder either disappears or gets pulled away by night, we have all become entrepreneurs - whether we want to or not.  Now that every job is temporary, there's no real point to hitching your wagon to a falling star.

Time was, that a secure position with a reputable corporation, with rooms-full of friends, and a generous retirement meant walking away from something to not give up.  Very few have anything remotely that good today,

In short, if your job is evaporating anyway, you have little to lose by striking out on your own, and following a passion.  What's the worst that can happen?  You discover that your passion is not great enough.  Or, that you run out of money.  Join the club.

Here's why to stay with what you've got.

• I can always explore passions and other interests outside of work; dude, try your hand at small motor repair, or organic pomegranate growing; now is the time;
• Because of the children; a cheap "out"; set a role model for the offspring, not offer transparent excuses;
• I'm too old to make a change now; How old?  105? Are you afraid of stepping out of your comfort zone?  Are you using this reluctance as an excuse?;
• I have too many expenses; Don't we all?  If you're inspired for the long haul, you'll figure out where to cut, and why; you'll self-teach how to run a small business, and survive;
• But, I don't know what I'm passionate about; all the more reason to stay while you sort through the options; what a boon! - opportunities to continue learning and experiencing alternatives; you have the right, the obligation, even, to sort out your own path to happiness and satisfaction

The freedom to fail, the latitude to flounder, the emancipation from a corporate strait-jacket - all the right reasons to stay in the wrong job.

This is particularly vital to physical and mental health in SCM, where it is all too easy to burn out.

Stay Awake; Leave Sleeping For Your Career!

Please enjoy the thoughts and musings of our friend, supporter, and long-time contributor Art van Bodegraven Jr., who passed away on June 18, 2017. Art was a prolific writer and had amassed a collection of unpublished blog posts he had planned to run well into the future. To honor his memory, we will continue to post these remaining blogs as he had intended. If you’ve been a fan of The Art of Art blog, check out our tribute.

 

What does it take to keep your career in overdrive?  Do the rules change?  Not really, not in a year or two - maybe over a generation or two.  But, getting into gear is prettty much the same today as it was a year ago.  

Begin with tossing out any thought that getting up and going to work in some hum-drum role is the same as building and keeping a career.  And, dump the notion that a lousy job with a decent income and comfortable benefits is smart.  It may have been 55 years ago.

Today, though, your obligation to yourself is to love your work, cherish its triumphs, rock on its successes, and crush it every single day.  If all you do is shoot for a target because someone gave you one, you are short-changing your life - you're on someone else's path to satisfaction.  It';s niot a win if you''ve just won someone else's Gold Star.

And, if you get that coveted promotion, but like neither the work nor your colleagues, you lose - big time.  Now that we are all entrepreneurs, we need to actively manage our careers.

That means running yourself as a business, with implications of doing what you want to, with whom you choose, in your own way.  The right job or role gives you immense power an opportunity: contacts and a network that works; resume entries and relevant war stories; wisdom; confidence; dragon-slaying capabilities; and an empowering sense of accomplishment.

Nurturing these allows, permits, and encourages planning for next steps and stages of business and personal life - of defining plans for growth and success, of creating your own life path.

From there, you'll know what pains prospective clients; how much the pains cost until repaired, and what the signs and manifestations of business pain are.

After mastery of clients and self, go for it!  And, good luck managing that new career.

Attitude vs. Altitude: Does IQ Help?

Please enjoy the thoughts and musings of our friend, supporter, and long-time contributor Art van Bodegraven Jr., who passed away on June 18, 2017. Art was a prolific writer and had amassed a collection of unpublished blog posts he had planned to run well into the future. To honor his memory, we will continue to post these remaining blogs as he had intended. If you’ve been a fan of The Art of Art blog, check out our tribute.

 

Altitude is IQ on steroids.  So, today's question is whether it's better, or more useful, to be super-smart or super-empathetic.  My bias is for empathetic, because it requires solid understanding of how brains are wired, and why styles, preferences, and attributes appear the way they manifest themselves in differently-wired individuals.

People will obey bosses, by the way, but they will follow leaders.  Leaders are persuasive in their visions (and have intelligent, actionable plans) which makes it easier for both leaders and followers to get the right things done in the right way.  

IQ - the smartest little girl or boy in the room is a turn off; EQ - the most accesssible and understanding person in the room is a turn on.  Which do you suppose has greater sustained success?  Some clues may be found, adapted in a Forbes piece, which outlines several attributes of high EQ leaders.

They begin with the idea that there is no failure; rather there are things that don't work as planned, and we can figure out how to solve the underlying problem(s).  They continue with: Don't stay helpless; bounce back from adversity, and escape momentary despair; be passionate, and pursue visions relentlessly; take action, and - empowered - overcome fears; go the extra mile, and more, preferably in someone else's shoes; expect results, and overcome the losses that come with failure; reinforce the commitment to results, and motivate yourself, enabling  motivation of others; be flexible, reacting to unexpected adversity, and pull  out all the stops until results show up; don't complain, and avoid the appearance of a fixed, non-growth mindset that squanders opportunity; and get it together, keeping it together, and becoming the total package.

Yes, it is about EQ, and its value, not about IQ and its superficial benefits.  These are part and parcel of SCM leadership, and leadership in general.  Work on sharpening your EQ; hide your IQ under a bushel; show followers how much you appreciate them.

 

The Myth Of Going To The Store

Please enjoy the thoughts and musings of our friend, supporter, and long-time contributor Art van Bodegraven Jr., who passed away on June 18, 2017. Art was a prolific writer and had amassed a collection of unpublished blog posts he had planned to run well into the future. To honor his memory, we will continue to post these remaining blogs as he had intended. If you’ve been a fan of The Art of Art blog, check out our tribute.

 

Reflecting the rise of e-commerce and decline in traditional  shopping transactions, the physical state of US retail is in disarray - on a good day.

Brick and mortar stores are collapsing at alarming rates, with enormous real estate challenges.  Sears is comatose, and Macy's is dazed and confused.  The job losses are now in the thousands, and markets are in disarrray.

A billion - that's with a B - square feet will be available soon, at take a haircut rates.

Payless Shoes has gone under, as will Rue21 and its 1,000 stores, and as have hhgregg, Gordman's, and Gander Mountain.  And, as has Radio Shack for a second outing, yet another flirtation with people with more money than sense.

2017 is projected to see over 8,500 store closings.  As a point of reference, the collapse of 2008 saw only 6,200 store closings.  JCPenney is expected to add to the now-staggering total of some 10% of retail space.

Re-invention of the mall is the obvious answer, but there's a question of who's left after the shakeout.  Ity does not seem to this observer that Orange Julius is the answer, any more than Hallowe'en might be.

And, not in a mall, Ralph Lauren has closed its flagship 5th Avenue store, a luxury the brand could no longer afford.

Growth And Risk: Mutually Exclusive?

Please enjoy the thoughts and musings of our friend, supporter, and long-time contributor Art van Bodegraven Jr., who passed away on June 18, 2017. Art was a prolific writer and had amassed a collection of unpublished blog posts he had planned to run well into the future. To honor his memory, we will continue to post these remaining blogs as he had intended. If you’ve been a fan of The Art of Art blog, check out our tribute.

 

Target and other food manufacturers, acording to Bloomberg and ISM as reported in MHLNews, have reported that Parmesan cheese contained absolutely no cheese.  Additionally, the faux cheese contained a heaping dose of cellulose.  Yum, wood chips and plastique. All loaded into a jar of powdered Parmwsan that would make real cheese blush.

Risk and risk management are hot topics that command webinars and presentations until the last eyes glaze over.  We here no end of floods, famine, supplier collapse, material shortages, and war precious metals.  Supply leaders stay up at night over these, and related, issues.  So, VPs of Supply are troubled.

Not only are Supply Chain VPs on edge, the Financial VPs, CFOs are contributing to the seriousness of the problem.  Chief Purchasing Officers, some 80%, report directly to their CFOs.  And, they are under unholy pressure to grow both profits and the corporation.

Their genuine challenges, include product adulteration, unseemly food manufacturing ingredients, ethical lapses, including in automotive - all driven by CPOs, while operations management sweat the small stuff, including natural disasters.

Other CPO responsibilities include: food adulteration, auto manufacture defects, slave labor financial misfeasance, and an absence of policy.

What it takes to fix things include: policy-driven supplier performance; zero tolerance for corruption; promotion of organization diversity and inclusion; active support of environmental behaviors and environmental responsibility; and valuing and respecting human rights.

Do the right thing, bro . . .

All Aboard! Is Everyone On The Plane Yet?

Please enjoy the thoughts and musings of our friend, supporter, and long-time contributor Art van Bodegraven Jr., who passed away on June 18, 2017. Art was a prolific writer and had amassed a collection of unpublished blog posts he had planned to run well into the future. To honor his memory, we will continue to post these remaining blogs as he had intended. If you’ve been a fan of The Art of Art blog, check out our tribute.

 

All employees need and deserve a thorough on-boarding process.  Too often, we pigeon-hole pick/pack/ship functionaries into an on-boarding process.  Those are valuable, especially when and if maintained.  But, Executive On-boarding is also vital.

Solid executive preparation makes functional training even more valuable.  But, its elements are different, and include:

• Position Yourself For Success Heading Into A New Job; Remember that leadership is personal; unlock personal connections with an opening message (and vision); establish your style, preferences, behaviors, values, and attitudes
• Leverage The Fuzzy Front End Between Accepting And Starting; not saying is as important as saying; taking action is incredibly more effective than waiting to see what happens when you take control; start from the beginning, communicate with all stakeholders, jump-start action plans, begin building relationships
• Take Control of Day One; deliberate selection of first impressions; follow-up ending impressions; don't sweat everything that happens inbetween
• Activate Ongoing Communication; master a full range of media, employ when and where appropriate, including orally; be prepared to change as tools and techniques shift
• Get Alignment Around A Burning Imperative; have a vision, make it a real possibiity, start selling the concept from Day One
• Drive Operational Accountability; inspire and enable high-performing teams to do their complete best
• Start Strengthening The Organization; identify skills, acquire talent, develop individuals and the organization; round peg, round hole; square peg square hole
• Extend Effort Well-Beyond Your First 100 Days; Keep going.  Keep building.  Begin the process of continual evolution (to be revisited)

Greed And Creative Collaboration

Please enjoy the thoughts and musings of our friend, supporter, and long-time contributor Art van Bodegraven Jr., who passed away on June 18, 2017. Art was a prolific writer and had amassed a collection of unpublished blog posts he had planned to run well into the future. To honor his memory, we will continue to post these remaining blogs as he had intended. If you’ve been a fan of The Art of Art blog, check out our tribute.

 

This is a tale of two suppliers.  One appeared to consistently go the extra mile; the other fought every battle imaginable to combat cost and waste.

The saga began innocently, as so many do.  A key supplier could neither specify  how much a new one might cost, nor what the cost elements were.  However, the supplier did allow that this year's annual price increase would be in the 7-8% range.

An investigation followed, whereupon it was revealed that a competitor had stumbled into being an alternate source.  Gradually, over time, the original price  differential evaporated, and there was no longer an appreciable difference between suppliers.

A suspicion grew that both suppliers thought they had the buyer over a barrel, and were leveraging their (perceived) strengths.

Now, the hard part.  Persuading enterprise leadership that changing specs made sense.  Unfortunately, the client decision-maker suffered a last minute challenge.  What he thought was a fly was, sad but true, actually a bee.  And it stung him. In a place where no one wants - ever - to be stung.

So, the stuffing came out of that turkey - really fast.  When the source of the bee became known, the company became the de facto leader in going the extra mile - especially with the extra cost and effort involved, and a requirement that an employee must issue a written request to release medical (personal, private) records.

Meanwhile, the competition was caught in the torment of Stations of the Cross as it battled cost demons that were not really real.  And, our intrepid purchasor's reputation as a "git 'er done" kind of guy spread throughout other contracts and commodities.

Word is: word of mouth is better than no word at all.

Last One Leaving, Please Turn Out The Lights . . .

Please enjoy the thoughts and musings of our friend, supporter, and long-time contributor Art van Bodegraven Jr., who passed away on June 18, 2017. Art was a prolific writer and had amassed a collection of unpublished blog posts he had planned to run well into the future. To honor his memory, we will continue to post these remaining blogs as he had intended. If you’ve been a fan of The Art of Art blog, check out our tribute.

 

The March of the Robots is turning into a stampede.  Mall stores are shuttering at a record pace.  More middle-class pople are out of work, possibly terminally. Dave Blanchard in Material Handling & Logistics asks if robots are her to help humans, or take away their more mundane jobs.

MIT's (and BU's) scholars have discovered that wherever robots are deployed in visible totals (and roles), wages tend to go down.  And, employment to population ratios  get cut in half.  Today's leader needs to have his or her communications ratios in order; the next question is most likely to be along the lines of: "Is my present job going to get automated out of existence"?

The ultimate automated warehouse/DC solution is one in which humans can be removed from the tedia of inventories, order picking, and material transport.

Elon Musk's reassurances that jobs will be better, and better paid, than ever before ring hollow, given the evidence.

Meanwhile, Marble, a co-branded robot, has quietly been making a stir.  It now partners with Yelp for automated food delivery.  Marble has been far from the epicenter of robotic delivery, with a European counterpart that has been ahead of the game.  Domino's is offering pizza, and Zume Pizza applies and spreads the sauce, while another drone slides the pie into the oven.  Marble's founders sharev a vision of improving life for all of its urban neighborhoods.  Yeah, right.

And, we're now at the place at which the first generation of robots needs automation education, creating a first-generation of automated robotics operators.

So long, carpenters and jointers.  Adieu, auf wiedersehen electricians.

News flash!  Training former drivers to replicate driving tasks simply postpones the inevitable.

Agents 86 And 99 Strike Back At KAOS And Get Smart

Please enjoy the thoughts and musings of our friend, supporter, and long-time contributor Art van Bodegraven Jr., who passed away on June 18, 2017. Art was a prolific writer and had amassed a collection of unpublished blog posts he had planned to run well into the future. To honor his memory, we will continue to post these remaining blogs as he had intended. If you’ve been a fan of The Art of Art blog, check out our tribute.

 

Unlikely as it seems, Don Adams and Barabara Feldon (Agents 86 & 99) are taking their revenge, foiling the best efforts by K.A.O.S. to trip them up.  The secret lies in (pun intended) getting smart in the procurement sector.

Many, even most, organizations struggle with procurement.  It's no big problem to make tactical purchases, which can save an easy 2 or 3 % of total spend.  Getting at the hard part, realizing the 8-12% that is found in world-class operations is tougher.

A multi-talented procurement team can provide great insight, business intelligence, and leverage. But, in a siloed organization, bits and pieces of savings are seldom bundled, and overcoming organizational dysfunction takes time, basic intelligence, and powers of persuasion.

The real secret is in the creation of collaborative partnerships, in which responsibility for target accomplishment is shared among business units.  The intelligence that emerges is powerful, especially when it identifies sub-par procurement.

It's also uswful in making sure that claimed savings really happen - and stick.  It's that bits and pieces thing again, in which aggregate results never show up in the financials.

At day's end, the game is about, not savings, but about investment.  Here's a seqeunce to contemplate: Buy well; buy better; spend wisely; spend for tomorrow; spend - and collaborate - to cement supplier relationships.

More: Get a handle on demand; design to cost or to functionality; reduce systems and process costs; spend the savings.  It's a cost well worth the expense.