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in mathematical, inventory, network-design, or transportation modeling? Does your company do a good job
of mentoring, developing, and retaining highly skilled
professionals?
To get the right people on the CoE team, look for supply chain professionals who have both the aptitude and
the passion for analytical modeling, and provide them
with rich, diverse experiences. Consider tapping into the
supply chain talent as well as the research on best practices at a nearby university with a strong supply chain
or operations research program. To help CoE experts
stay on top of cutting-edge techniques and practices,
you’ll also need to provide them with mentoring and
skills-development programs that enable them to not
only maintain deep expertise, but to also effectively mentor more-junior members. In essence, your CoE needs
leaders with both technical and soft skills.
2. Ensure strong executive sponsorship and guidance. Your high-performing CoE team needs to report
to a senior-level executive sponsor who has the power to
enable them to carve out time to focus on supply chain
improvement projects. With sponsorship at the highest
corporate level, your CoE team won’t become an isolated “island” whose analyses are filed away and never put
to use, but rather will lead the way on key supply chain
standardization and improvement efforts.
Your CoE team will benefit if you also develop a
proactive, cross-functional or cross-divisional steering
committee that includes your company’s major con-stituencies. This committee can stay abreast of—and
be involved with and internally promote—the CoE’s
best practices and successes. This will be key to opening
doors and overcoming resistance to CoE activities like
data gathering and assessing supply chain performance,
as well as resistance to making significant operational
changes.
CoEs have a tendency to go “off mission.” Ironically,
this is often the result of doing great work or having great
people. As a CoE attains success it can become a catchall
for special projects, solving emergencies, and powerful
sponsors’ pet projects. To prevent this, the senior sponsor and steering committee need to protect the mission of
the CoE with an actively managed work-inflow process.
3. Provide good analytical tools. The CoE team often
is tasked with reviewing different supply chain technologies and analyzing critical technology gaps and priorities
for the organization’s short- and long-term supply chain
needs and business requirements. CoE experts will analyze a supply chain solution’s time-to-value, its return on
investment (ROI), and the time needed to close capabil-
ity gaps. They’ll also be able to address business-critical
issues, like linking supply chain technologies and strategies to large customers’ needs and demands.
Like other good craftsmen, CoE experts like to work
with good tools. You’ll be best served if you enable your
CoE team to choose the feature-rich and robust technology they need to drive supply chain analyses.
4. Bring core CoE team members together in one
place. Although it is entirely possible to create a virtual
center of excellence by having experts across the company collaborate electronically, they often can be more
effective if they work together in the same location. One
reason is that doing so can improve communication
and collaboration. For example, supply chain design is
extremely complex, and the analyses lend themselves
to sitting side-by-side and graphically depicting and
explaining ideas. A centralized group can also help to
resolve another common concern: it’s hard for an expert
to have credibility across the company when he or she
is remote and attached to a particular business unit.
And finally, a centrally located department promotes
the most efficient use of a limited talent pool, allowing
experts to focus on the CoE’s mission rather than having
to juggle responsibilities on both a business-unit and a
corporate level.
5. Develop a clear and meaningful career path for
CoE team members. While many companies guide
would-be supply chain executives through rotations in
functions such as inbound logistics, distribution, and
procurement, few develop a meaningful career path for
the technical-minded individuals populating their CoE
teams. These experts, with their advanced degrees in
computer science, operations research, data analytics,
or supply chain management, enjoy problem solving
and the challenge of improving enterprise systems and
processes. They may be excited by the process of analyzing and determining which warehouses should be
opened and which should be closed, but they would feel
challenged and overwhelmed if they had to manage the
actual closing of a distribution center and the relocation
of inventory to other operations. It can be difficult to
keep their work varied and intellectually stimulating;
they rarely want to take on repetitive tasks or duties, and
they also tend to like working on varied types of models
and analyses.
Ideally, a career path for CoE experts will both challenge their technical competency and protect those rare
and valuable members who have both strong technical skills and a high degree of management acumen.
However, more-technical CoE employees rarely have a
