BY ART VAN BODEGRAVEN AND
KENNETH B. ACKERMAN
basictraining
Mind the gap, mate:
A critical supply/demand mismatch
ANYONE RETURNING FROM A VISIT TO THE UNITED
Kingdom is likely to be much taken with the signature admonition
from London’s Tube, designed to keep people from stepping into the
open space between subway trains and the platform, risking either
death or life-altering maiming. We have another gap to deal with, and
a failure to do so could easily have economic life-altering negative
consequences.
The gap in question is the comprehensive talent shortage that
afflicts nearly every facet of supply chain management. The problem
goes well beyond truck operators, although the
driver shortage is staggering, with a looming shortfall numbering in the hundreds of thousands. It’s
also about a shortage of comparable magnitude in
analytic talent—not to mention in forklift drivers,
order selectors, and customer service specialists.
The list could go on and on.
All this goes a long way toward explaining why
we are, in the collective, experiencing a nearly
unprecedented boom in corporate efforts to capture, develop, and retain top-level performers in
supply chain management. The forward-looking
organizations are investing significantly in educating, training, recruiting, and rewarding human
resources at all levels and in all supply chain functions. Many, regrettably, are not. They will be the ones hearing Ross Perot’s giant sucking sound as their key employees run like the wind into the arms of
progressive companies as economic recovery continues.
At the end of the day, however, these initiatives are focused on get-
ting a bigger slice of a pie that is too small to feed the entire supply
chain community. Getting more than one’s fair share of drivers, for
example, does nothing to alleviate the overall industry shortage. One
vital question becomes, “What are we doing, as an industry, as a
nation, to create a bigger pie—an adequate talent pool at all levels in
all supply chain functions?”
The short answer is, “Not nearly enough.”
In some functional areas, immigration could provide some ongo-
ing relief, difficult as that message might be to accept while the over-
all economy still struggles. Retraining displaced workers from other
industries can also help take the edge off resource shortages in oper-
ational supply chain functionality. But these, unless pursued on a
broad scale, could turn out to be mere bandages.
One of the most important developments in growing the supply
chain resource base and talent pool has been
Walgreens’ initiative in integrating disabled work-
ers into supply chain operations and manage-
ment. Senior Vice President Randy Lewis’s vision
and commitment have created a heretofore unrec-
ognized talent pool. And the concept is rolling out
into many other companies’ operations.
WHERE WE FALL SHORT TODAY
The gaps begin to show themselves in the current
generation of supply chain management practitioners. We don’t have enough visionary leaders.
The weeds are full of people in leadership positions who are merely managers, at best, and miscast dweebs at worst. In mid-level populations,
fluency in the application of analytic tools tends
to be limited, and not everyone realizes that
PowerPoint is not an analytic tool.
Functional specialists, in both management
and execution, too often have a view of the supply chain that includes not much more than their
siloed responsibilities. The concept of a holistic
and integrated end-to-end supply chain is, to
them, something that academics and consultants
