he’s authored or co-authored four books on systematic
planning and network design. Perhaps not surprisingly,
Natarajan, who was honored as a DC VELOCITY Rainmaker
in 2009, has earned a host of industry accolades, including
the Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals
(CSCMP) Supply Chain Innovation Award.
Currently, Natarajan is focusing on finding new ways to
apply technology to solve business challenges and revolutionize how supply chains serve consumers. He recently
spoke with DC VELOCITY Contributing Editor Toby Gooley
about the future of supply chain technology and how supply chain professionals can prepare themselves and their
companies to succeed in a constantly changing world.
QYou advocate encouraging “productivity of the mind” in supply chain organizations. What do you mean by
that, and why is it important?
A Productivity of thinking is some- thing you can actually measure as the
ability to have situational awareness and
react very quickly. People often address
problems with mundane solutions if they
don’t have a structured way of thinking
about them. If you have a framework for
thinking about problems, it drives you
to consider both the obvious and the
non-obvious. This should increase situational awareness—anticipating what will
happen before it happens and pre-posi-tioning responses ahead of time.
Businesses today are evolving rapidly. The primary axes of change include
time, networks, networks of networks,
relationships with our customers, and the use of data in
real time. And all of these are changing asynchronously. To
take advantage of these changes, navigate them, and deal
with threats, the productivity of our thinking must increase
dramatically. We need to incorporate and implement our
people’s ideas and realign ourselves very quickly.
One way to do that is to think through more than one
solution to a problem. What was contextually right at one
point in time may be completely wrong two years later.
If you have “A to B” and “B to A” scenarios, you will be
better prepared for change. You will know how to respond
because you have already thought through two opposite
solutions for that scenario. When you have determined the
right approach, you will have strategic options ready to execute. In this way, you can accelerate organizational change.
Another is to have all employees see themselves as a
potential provider of personalized service; when that hap-
pens, hyperlocal opportunities quickly emerge. For exam-
ple, an employee might deliver a package for a customer on
the way home; another might offer a painting service for a
customer who is apprehensive about doing the painting.
QWhen you were in the beverage industry, you were instrumental in improving product handling equipment and processes. Tell us about one solution that continues to have a significant impact.
AAt Coca-Cola Bottling Co., we developed the CooLift beverage-delivery system, which is now a standard
throughout the industry. The specially designed carts and
pallets make the job of moving beverages from truck to
store much quicker, safer, and more efficient. We developed the solution by looking for a merchandising delivery
system that reduced the risk of injury and could be used
easily by anyone. We analyzed the whole supply chain as a
system, deconstructed it, and identified where and how we
could improve it.
When I was with PepsiCo, the same
“system” approach led to a host of
other innovations, including geo-based
delivery, automation of the manufac-turing-to-merchandising processes,
building orders like Lego bricks so they
could be merchandised in minutes versus hours, centralizing and automating
routing and dispatching, implementing
reputational integrity systems to manage
bad actors, and virtual control towers
to handle the order flow on an exception basis. In this way, every one of our
cumbersome processes got a facelift. As
a result, we were able to launch several
billion-dollar brands and simplify the work of thousands of
field associates. I am grateful to the teams that enabled this
and the executives who inspired us to think this way.
QYour name is on some 300 patents. What are some of the areas you’ve focused on?
AMy purpose in filing patents has been to support and protect my employer’s business with respect to the
future of logistics and commerce. Some of the subject areas
that emerged in the past few years include autonomous
vehicles—air, ground, on the road, and in the home; the
last 100 feet into a consumer’s home and in the kitchen;
cognitive commerce, where data collection and analysis
allows me to know you so well that even before you need
something I will get it to you, which leapfrogs search altogether; just-in-time replenishment to the home according
to values, affinities, and preferences held in the cloud,
which obviates the need for ordering or in-home inventory;
