BY SUSAN LACEFIELD, EDITOR AT LARGE
THE DC VELOCITY Q&A
thoughtleaders

Consultant, academic, and author John Gattorna has been encouraging companies to rethink how they design their supply chains, so that they put the human at the center.

This story first appeared in the Quarter 3/2018 edition of

CSCMP’s Supply Chain Quarterly, a journal of thought leadership for the supply chain management profession and a sister publication to AGiLE Business Media’s DC VELOCITY. Readers can obtain a subscription by joining the Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals (whose membership dues include The Quarterly’s subscription fee). Subscriptions are also available to nonmembers for $34.95 (digital) or $89 a year (print). For more information, visit www.SupplyChainQuarterly.com.

INTERVIEW WITH
JOHN GATTORNA

The supply chain anthropologist

WHEN SUPPLY CHAIN CONSULTANT AND THOUGHT leader John Gattorna received the Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals’ (CSCMP) 2018 Distinguished Service Award, he was recognized for his work on “ dynamic alignment” in the supply chain. Dynamic alignment involves segmenting your customers and matching the supply chain to those customer segments.

While there have been countless supply chain consul-
tants, analysts, and academics who have provided models
and frameworks for supply chain segmentation, Gattorna’s
work differs in one key way: It places the human at the
center of all supply chain or value network design efforts.
As Gattorna writes, “People and their behaviors inside and
outside the enterprise are at the heart of supply chains.”
Gattorna’s work through his analysis and consulting
firm Gattorna Alignment has an almost anthropological or
sociological flair to it. He and his colleagues help compa-
nies diagnose their customers’ behaviors and segment them
according to those behaviors. They then analyze whether
the culture within the company complements its custom-
ers’ behaviors and values. Finally, they help the company
change the internal culture of its supply chain to better
match those customer behaviors.

Gattorna has detailed this work in his books Living Supply Chains and Dynamic Supply Chains. Now, he is set to release a third book on the subject with his colleague Deborah Ellis: Transforming Supply Chains: Reinvent your enterprise from the “outside-in” to be more flexible and market responsive. Gattorna took some time out at the CSCMP Edge annual conference last fall to talk to Susan Lacefield, executive editor of CSCMP’s Supply Chain Quarterly and DC Velocity editor at large, about the new book. (To see a video of the interview, go to www.supplychainquarterly. com/video/.)