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QWhy do you think so few companies are using social media in supply chain management?
AThe purpose of social media is to network people and to foster collaboration. Most companies have functional, hierarchical organizations. Functional structures
are, in and of themselves, anticollaboration, and they make
it difficult for the social model to permeate the enterprise.
The functional hierarchy is a command-and-control model
where everything everybody does is prescribed, predictable,
and controlled by a few individuals at the top. …
The social model has been emerging for the past 10 years
and is based on completely different premises. For instance,
it believes that there are a lot more people at the bottom
than at the top, and therefore problems can be solved more
rapidly at the bottom of the organization. It fosters the
capacity of individuals in a community network to sponta-
neously construct solutions to problems or even to invent
new processes, without any specific direction from a senior
manager.
In the social model, “plans of action” are not made up
front by a smart manager. They are developed progressively by a community that plans and acts at the same time.
It’s “organized chaos,” something the hierarchical model
dreads.
In the traditional functional model, communication is
formal, actions obey established protocols, and ways of
doing things are specified in detailed, controlled proce-
dures. If you want to change how things are done or, worse,
by whom, you have to go through the pain and time [need-
ed to] change the bureaucracy of a controlling structure—
[you have to] change detailed procedures, go through long
approval cycles, change job descriptions, change organiza-
tional charts.
In the social model, roles are defined with clarity and
simplicity. Communities are directed to broad but very
clear, tangible goals, and individuals are free to figure out
as communities how to get things done, leveraging their
multiple skills and competencies.
The difficulty we’re seeing with social media penetrating the core of enterprises is the difficulty of a command-and-control model migrating to a social model. But
it will happen. By 2020, only 25 percent of the work force in
North America will be baby boomers; most of the rest will
be Generation Y and Z. [That’s when things will change.]
QHow could social media transform supply chain opera- tions in the future?
ASupply chain management is the only real horizontally functional group at the core of manufacturing companies, if we exclude project management. It plays a very
helpful role as the coordinator and synchronizer of all the
pieces of the “puzzle.” But it suffers from having no real
power to impose upon any of the doers of the chain and
from the agonizing difficulty that disparate silos have in
working together efficiently.
For SCM executives and professionals, social media is a
godsend. I suggest that SCM practitioners are in the perfect place to insert the social model in the enterprise and
between their enterprise and other supply chain partners
and customers.
To leverage the power of the social model, SCM executives need to think less about systems, data, and procedures
and instead focus on getting people of diverse skills working
together to solve problems.
In the past year alone, I lived through two experiences
in two completely different companies, one small and one
large, where I was asked to help improve the efficiency of
the supply chain and to improve service levels. Contrary
to what I would have done 10 years ago, I focused on get-
ting people to work together, more so than on processes.
Processes are just a frame of reference that helps everybody
think coherently. They bring coherence to the workplace,
but they don’t make the workplace work fast. …
In essence, then, SCM operations of the future should
be social-intense rather than process- or systems-intense.
Processes and systems will form the base upon which peo-
ple will do work, but managing and coordinating the supply
chain will be more about the ability to master the social
model, to strategize the best arrangement of hive commu-
nities, and above all, to be able to do so across enterprises.
