Continuing education is important not only for personal career development but also for learning new supply chain strategies and tactics. Here are a just a few examples of upcoming professional education programs around the world.
Master's program offers real-world experience
master of supply chain management program beginning in January 2008. This one-year program begins with an introduction to basic business disciplines, such as accounting, economics, marketing, and organizational behavior.
Students will also participate in a team-based summer project directed by a faculty supervisor at one of the school's corporate partners. The team will work on site to address a business problem identified by the sponsor company. When team members return to campus, they will conduct a detailed review and evaluation of the project.
Applicants are required to have completed the equivalent of a four-year U.S. bachelor's degree program and to have taken the Graduate Management Admission Test (GMAT). Tuition and fees are $38,988 for Michigan residents, $43,988 for nonresidents.
Program: University of Michigan's Master of Supply Chain Management Program Location: Ann Arbor, Michigan, U.S.A. Application deadline: August 1, 2007 Classes start: January 2008 Info:www.bus.umich.edu/Admissions/MSCM
Grad program brings executives into the classroom
Northeastern University has designed its graduate certificate program in supply chain management to focus on current best practices and to provide opportunities for students to interact with professionals in the field.
The program consists of four courses: supply chain management, transportation, an executive roundtable in supply chain management, and global supply chain management. They include a mix of class discussions, individual research projects, case analyses, and visits from professionals in the field. Past years' visitors have included the president of Maersk Logistics and the senior vice president of logistics and operations at Staples. Tuition for each course is $3,330.
Program: Northeastern University Graduate Certificate in Supply Chain Management Location: Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.A. Application deadline: July 25, 2007 Classes start: September 5, 2007 Info:www.cba.neu.edu/graduate
INSEAD emphasizes value-based management
INSEAD Business School's Supply Chain Management Executive Education Program focuses on how supply chain managers can improve the flow of material, information, and cash by optimizing their supply chain processes, organizational structures, and enabling technologies.
The program strives to help executives align the members of their supply chain "ecosystems" and broaden their understanding of supply chain management. At the same time, the program's instructors emphasize value-based management—whether that means creating value through product, process, or supply chain design or capturing value by coordinating the activities of the various companies within the supply chain. Tuition is 7,650 euros.
Program: INSEAD Executive Education: Supply Chain Management Location: Fontainebleau, France Dates: October 29-November 2, 2007 Info: www.insead.edu/executives/scm.cfm
CSCMP University offers convenient, flexible training
Stuck at Chicago's O'Hare airport due to inclement weather? Have some down time during a business trip to Shanghai? Or a rare bit of free time at the office? As long as you have Internet access, CSCMP has made it possible for you to attend the supply chain class of your choice anytime, anywhere.
CSCMP's Supply Chain University offers a selection of 40 online classes covering a broad spectrum of topics. There are courses appropriate for all levels of supply chain expertise, and each is identified as "basic," "intermediate," or "advanced." Classes range from one to four hours in length.
CSCMP is collaborating with the consulting firm Accenture's Supply Chain Academy on this venture. The Supply Chain University draws its faculty of experts from across the globe, and some of the courses are offered in multiple languages. Prices range from $79 to $149.
Pennsylvania State University's online program is designed to help students develop supply chain solutions for their organizations while gaining an understanding of how companies use supply chain networks to acquire, produce, and deliver goods and services both domestically and worldwide.
The Graduate Certificate in Supply Chain and Information Systems program integrates strategic procurement and supply management, demand fulfillment, supply chain planning, and network design processes along with the study of critical information systems. The courses will address such topics as information technology and decision support; supply strategy development, outsourcing, and supply segmentation; inventory cost analysis, planning, and control; and performance measurement.
The program consists of three classes of four credits each: supply chain management, transportation and distribution, and strategic procurement. The first course—supply chain management—can be taken either in the fall or spring semester. This gives prospective students two chances per year to apply. The entire program can be completed in 12 months.
J.B. Hunt President and CEO Shelley Simpson answers a question from the audience at the Tuesday afternoon keynote session at CSCMP's EDGE Conference. CSCMP President and CEO Mark Baxa listens attentively to her response.
Most of the time when CEOs present at an industry conference, they like to talk about their companies’ success stories. Not J.B. Hunt’s Shelley Simpson. Speaking today at the Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals’ (CSCMP) annual EDGE Conference, the trucking company’s president and CEO led with a story about a time that the company lost a major customer.
According to Simpson, the company had a customer of their dedicated contract business in 2001 that was consistently making late shipments with no lead time. “We were working like crazy to try to satisfy them, and lost their business,” Simpson said.
When the team at J.B. Hunt later met with the customer’s chief supply chain officer, they related all they had been doing for the company. “We told him that we were literally sitting our drivers and our trucks just for you, just to cover your shipments,” Simpson said. “And he said to us, ‘You never shared everything you were doing for us.’”
Out of that experience, came J.B. Hunt’s Customer Value Delivery framework. This framework, according to Simpson, provides a roadmap for creating value and anticipating customer needs.
Framework for Excellence
J.B. Hunt created the above framework to help them formulate better relationships with customers.
The framework consists of five steps:
Understand customer needs: It all starts, according to Simpson, with building a strong relationship with the customer and then using the information gained from those discussions to build a custom plan for the customer.
Deliver expectations: This step involves delivering on the promises made in that custom plan.
Measure results: J.B. Hunt believes that they are not done when freight makes it to the destination. They also need to measure how successful they were versus what the customer expected from them.
Communicate performance: This step involves a two-way exchange, where J.B. Hunt walks the customer through their performance and gets verbal agreement on whether or not they have met the customer’s needs.
Anticipate new value: Here J.B. Hunt looks at what they are hearing from their customer today and then uses that information to derive what the customer may be looking for in the future.
Simpson said the most important part of the process is the fourth step, communicating performance (perhaps reflecting the piece that went wrong in that initial failed customer relationship).
Not only can this framework be used to drive excellence in a company, but it can also be adapted as a model for driving personal excellence, Simpson said. Instead of understanding the customer needs, the process starts with understanding yourself: what your strengths and interests are. This understanding helps drive a personal development plan and personal goals for the year, which can be measured and assessed. For example, each year, Simpson gives herself a letter grade on each of her personal goals and communicates her assessment back to her boss. She has also found it helpful to anticipate where opportunities lie beyond what she is personally doing.
Confronted with the closed ports, most companies can either route their imports to standard East Coast destinations and wait for the strike to clear, or else re-route those containers to West Coast sites, incurring a three week delay for extra sailing time plus another week required to truck those goods back east, Ron said in an interview at the Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals (CSCMP)’s EDGE Conference in Nashville.
However, Uber Freight says its latest platform updates offer a series of mitigation options, including alternative routings, pre-booked allocation and volume during peak season, and providing daily visibility reports on shipments impacted by routings via U.S. east and gulf coast ports. And Ron said the company can also leverage its pool of some 2.3 million truck drivers who have downloaded its smartphone app, targeting them with freight hauling opportunities in the affected regions by pricing those loads “appropriately” through its surge-pricing model.
“If this [strike] continues a month, we will see severe disruptions,” Ron said. “So we can offer them alternatives. We say, if one door is closed, we can open another door? But even with that, there are no magic solutions.”
Turning around a failing warehouse operation demands a similar methodology to how emergency room doctors triage troubled patients at the hospital, a speaker said today in a session at the Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals (CSCMP)’s EDGE Conference in Nashville.
There are many reasons that a warehouse might start to miss its targets, such as a sudden volume increase or a new IT system implementation gone wrong, said Adri McCaskill, general manager for iPlan’s Warehouse Management business unit. But whatever the cause, the basic rescue strategy is the same: “Just like medicine, you do triage,” she said. “The most life-threatening problem we try to solve first. And only then, once we’ve stopped the bleeding, we can move on.”
In McCaskill’s comparison, just as a doctor might have to break some ribs through energetic CPR to get a patient’s heart beating again, a failing warehouse might need to recover by “breaking some ribs” in a business sense, such as making management changes or stock write-downs.
Once the business has made some stopgap solutions to “stop the bleeding,” it can proceed to a disciplined recovery, she said. And to reach their final goal, managers can use the classic tools of people, process, and technology to improve what she called the three most important key performance indicators (KPIs): on time in full (OTIF), inventory accuracy, and staff turnover.
CSCMP EDGE attendees gathered Tuesday afternoon for an update and outlook on the truckload (TL) market, which is on the upswing following the longest down cycle in recorded history. Kevin Adamik of RXO (formerly Coyote Logistics), offered an overview of truckload market cycles, highlighting major trends from the recent freight recession and providing an update on where the TL cycle is now.
EDGE 2024, sponsored by the Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals (CSCMP), is taking place this week in Nashville.
Citing data from the Coyote Curve index (which measures year-over-year changes in spot market rates) and other sources, Adamik outlined the dynamics of the TL market. He explained that the last cycle—which lasted from about 2019 to 2024—was longer than the typical three to four-year market cycle, marked by volatile conditions spurred by the Covid-19 pandemic. That cycle is behind us now, he said, adding that the market has reached equilibrium and is headed toward an inflationary environment.
Adamik also told attendees that he expects the new TL cycle to be marked by far less volatility, with a return to more typical conditions. And he offered a slate of supply and demand trends to note as the industry moves into the new cycle.
Supply trends include:
Carrier operating authorities are declining;
Employment in the trucking industry is declining;
Private fleets have expanded, but the expansion has stopped;
Truckload orders are falling.
Demand trends include:
Consumer spending is stable, but is still more service-centric and less goods-intensive;
After a steep decline, imports are on the rise;
Freight volumes have been sluggish but are showing signs of life.
CSCMP EDGE runs through Wednesday, October 2, at Nashville’s Gaylord Opryland Hotel & Resort.
The relationship between shippers and third-party logistics services providers (3PLs) is at the core of successful supply chain management—so getting that relationship right is vital. A panel of industry experts from both sides of the aisle weighed in on what it takes to create strong 3PL/shipper partnerships on day two of the CSCMP EDGE conference, being held this week in Nashville.
Trust, empathy, and transparency ranked high on the list of key elements required for success in all aspects of the partnership, but there are some specifics for each step of the journey. The panel recommended a handful of actions that should take place early on, including:
Establish relationships.
For 3PLs, understand and get to the heart of the shipper’s data.
Also for 3PLs: Understand the shipper’s reason for outsourcing to a 3PL, along with the shipper’s ultimate goals.
Understand company cultures and be sure they align.
Nurture long-term relationships with good communication.
For shippers, be transparent so that the 3PL fully understands your business.
And there are also some “non-negotiables” when it comes to managing the relationship:
3PLs must demonstrate their commitment to engaging with the shipper’s personnel.
3PLs must also demonstrate their commitment to process discipline, continuous improvement, and innovation.
Shippers should ensure that they understand the 3PL’s demonstrated implementation capabilities—ask to visit established clients.
Trust—which takes longer to establish than both sides may expect.
EDGE 2024 is sponsored by the Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals (CSCMP) and runs through Wednesday, October 2, at the Gaylord Opryland Resort & Convention Center in Nashville.