Q Why do you believe supply chain executives should use social media and social networks in their jobs?
A All the supply chain executives I’ve met in recent years face the same challenge: what I call “supply chain
disjointedness.” The hardest thing for them to do is to
synchronize all the parts of that chain—the various organizations and teams that the material flow goes through. You
can see this problem between companies: suppliers that
are late, stockouts, excess inventory, and so forth. You can
see this problem inside manufacturing operations as well:
materials not ready for production, or quality assurance
waiting for documentation that isn’t ready.
Synchronizing the supply chain can be helped by using
advanced planning systems, but systems can only do two
things, really: produce plans that synchronize everything,
and send you messages telling you that something went out
of sync.
When unexpected problems happen—materials don’t
pass laboratory tests, delays occur at the border, demand
suddenly surges—the flow of materials through the chain
stops, and something is delayed. That is what causes things
to go out of sync. At best, a system can send you a signal,
but a system can’t solve the problem that caused the delay
in the first place.
Only people can solve a problem that stopped the supply
chain. But that too is a challenge, because invariably when
there is a problem, it requires individuals of multiple skills
to come together to solve it. If an operator on a packaging
line for pharmaceutical tablets opens a barrel of tablets and
finds them cracked, what can he do? He calls his supervi-
sor, but the supervisor has to get a QA [quality assurance]
inspector to come in and decide whether to inspect the
tablets and then continue packaging, or reject the batch. If
the batch is suspended, the supervisor then needs to figure
out how to put another batch on the line. For that, he needs
planners to change the schedule and the warehouse to pre-
pare a new batch. And so on. …
With social media, we can implement a social model of
collaboration. In the virtual space provided by social media,
people can easily reach each other across silos, independently
of the hierarchy. When social media are used to solve prob-
lems, we see people of multiple skills react spontaneously to
posted issues. And the stream of conversations that ensue
after problems are posted leads to solutions [much more
rapidly than] with classic methods [of solving problems].
Supply chain executives should look at the social model
of collaboration that can be enabled through social media
as the most significant strategic weapon in supply chain
optimization today. It liberates them from the rigid frame-
work of functional structures and client-supplier relation-
ships. It is the best way I’ve seen to keep the supply chain
moving quickly, in spite of the many problems that will
always occur.
QHow can supply chain executives use social media in their operations?
A Over the past 10 years, I’ve used social media to solve unexpected problems in operations and have found
certain strategies that work well. From that experience,
I derived a model that I’ve been using in my consulting
assignments.
It’s called the “hive model.” A hive is a community of
individuals of multiple skills who have the responsibility of
solving issues within a specific scope. Individuals in a hive
are empowered to make decisions using their knowledge
or, when needed, by “poking” senior managers to “come
in” and make decisions the hive cannot make.
In this model—which is a social model for the work-
place—individuals don’t go “upward” to escalate issues;
they call managers to come “downward” and help solve the
problem when and where the managers are needed. It is
what I call “reverse escalation.”
But what is the scope of a hive, and how many hives
should there be? First and foremost: A hive is not a func-
tional group. A universal principle I’ve learned over the
years is that, generally speaking, collaboration isn’t needed
within a functional group; it is needed across skill sets. So,
you should not create functional hives.
The scope of a hive equates with a mission that produces
results that are significant to a customer. One example of
a hive and its mission would be maintaining a high service
level for customers of a specific market segment, which
would involve individuals from customer service, product
management, sales, and supply chain management (SCM).
Another example would be achieving and maintaining
fast delivery times for finished goods. That would involve
people from SCM, warehousing, production, quality, and
purchasing. …
In very large enterprises, these would be examples of
types of hives rather than hives as such. For each type, you
could have multiple hives. For instance, for the customer
service example, you could have a hive for Canada, another
for the U.S., another for the U.K., and so on. …
At times, the same people appear in multiple hives, and
they play important roles in keeping the network of hives
coherent. For instance, in the above examples, the custom-
er service hives would be market-centric, and the deliv-
ery-time hives would be plant-centric. In both, the people
from SCM would function as the link between the two sides
of that “matrix.”
