Category: Supply Chain Career
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Why is Supply Chain Management Important?
Why is Supply Chain Management important? I stumbled across this question recently, and it got my wheels turning on why my chosen profession matters. While people I talk to now generally know what supply chain teams do (we get you the proverbial or literal toilet paper), there’s more to it than that. I’ve worked for… Read more
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What makes a Utility Supply Chain unique?
Supply Chains in different industries have a lot in common – including price sensitivity, negotiations, the importance of resiliency, warehouse space issues (always either too much or too little), and the typical process of bid to purchase order to receipt. However, different industries have different considerations and tolerances beyond these basics. For a company sourcing… Read more
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Building Your Dream Procurement Team: Roles, Responsibilities, and Staffing Levels
We’ve been talking about supply chain structure and reporting chains recently, so let’s chat a little about front-line procurement roles. Today we’ll talk about role descriptions, and also talk about staffing levels needed when building/rebuilding/reevaluating a team. Role Descriptions When searching Indeed for supply chain roles, I found a list of 18 roles. I had… Read more
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Supply Chain Structure: One Central Team or Decentralized Services?
Recently we’ve been talking about which C-suite role a supply chain team reports to, both the more common executive leaders and the less common ones. So today we’re going to talk a bit about the structure of a supply chain team in an organization. In particular, we’ll cover four structures: No formal supply chain, decentralized,… Read more
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Demystifying Supply Chain: The Essential Roles of Procurement, Logistics & Warehousing
What is the difference between “supply chain” and “procurement”? One of my favorite silver linings after COVID is that when people ask me what I do, I now answer “Supply chain” and they reply, “You’re the people who get us toilet paper!” Or sometimes I can see them simply thinking it. Yes, we get you… Read more
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C-Suite Smackdown Continued: Who Else Could Lead Your Supply Chain?
Continuing our conversation from last week, let’s talk about some of the less common spots a supply chain team can fit into an org chart. Last week we looked at having the supply chain leader report to the CEO, CFO, COO, CRO, and CAO. This week, let’s look at the Chief Lean/Optimization/Continuous Improvement Officer (CLO),… Read more
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C-Suite Smackdown: Where Should Your Supply Chain Leader Report?
An experienced executive and mentor of mine once told me, “Every org chart fixes some problems and creates others.” I saw this happen firsthand when I was the leader of a 150-person team, with members from multiple businesses within a conglomerate company. The discussion of that organization and centralized vs. non-centralized supply chain is for… Read more
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Guide to Dubai for the Female Professional
Before I went to Dubai on a business trip last week, I went hunting for a “woman professional’s guide to Dubai” and turned up short. So after networking with a friend of a friend who had been to Dubai before the pandemic and gathering my own data, I decided to write the quick guide I… Read more
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Robots vs. Relationships: Will AI Wipe Out Supply Chain Jobs?
A Visual Capitalist article on the impact of artificial intelligence on various job categories wandered across my news feed a couple weeks ago, and I’ve been pondering it ever since. Following the data trail, this data was a visualization of a white paper by the World Economic Forum (WEF) from September 2023, focused primarily on… Read more
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Mastering the Supply Chain Triad: Delivering Excellence in Delivery, Savings, and Efficiency
How often do you hear or think of the old adage “You can have it fast, you can have it good, you can have it cheap: pick two”? Do you think it’s true? In supply chain, the variation on this “iron triangle” is the conflict between the priorities of Delivery, Savings, and Efficiency. This article… Read more