DC Velocity - October 2010

thoughtleaders BRENT BEABOUT

waste. Another is that the stores now make better use of labor because workers no longer have to spend time moving a lot of merchandise around in the back room. And obviously, it decreases overall inventory levels, which saves a lot of money for a company this size.

QTurning to another topic, what do you consider to be the most important skill sets for a supply chain professional?

AI think you need a combination of things and not just industry experience anymore. As a matter of fact, I think that’s a handicap.

I think you have to be a little bit, I will call it bilingual— not in the literal sense, but you have to be able to speak operations and have some operations experience, be that in transportation, the DC, or somewhere else. You need that street credibility to work well with the group that runs the supply chain, to be able to speak their language.

You also have to be able to speak the language of finance because at the end of the day, that’s the language of business, right? That’s what sells, if you will, at the CFO, CEO level.

You also have to be able to speak technology because technology is probably the key enabler when it comes to getting supply chain performance where it needs to be. So the supply chain executive, I think, now needs to speak all those languages to be competitive.

QLet’s take a look at the horizon. What’s next for the supply chain? AI do think robotics are going to expand considerably. We talk about them most often for a new-built facility, right? I think they’re at the point now where they are flexible enough and cheap enough where you can justify investing in them to run critical parts of your business. They have been in manufacturing for years, but in supply chain, they just haven’t been cost effective until now.

Second, I see a lot of potential in some of the technology out there that is not even necessarily supply chain-relat-ed—a lot of the things you see at Best Buy or in manufacturing or what have you. I think there is a lot of room for bolting together commercial off-the-shelf software or hardware with some kind of small software app in the middle, a little like we did at DHL—combine a Garmin with a GPS and a software package and together, they add up to more than the sum of the parts, if that makes sense.

QYes, it does.

AOn the technology side, I think that’s where the early bird gets the worm, so to speak. The people who figure that out—that it could be a whole lot cheaper to bolt together existing applications than to try to develop a proprietary system from scratch—will have the advantage over companies that don’t think about that. ;