@ Supply Chain Management

In Rainmakers… Part 2, I want to go through the list and Q&A of the Rainmakers identified by DC Velocity in their article Who are this year’s Rainmakers?. The previous post in this series is here: Rainmakers… Part 1.

So let’s get started,

Judy McReynolds [Arkansas Best Corp]

Q: You have taken the reins of Arkansas Best during a very challenging time for the economy, transportation, and the LTL segment in particular. LTL faces overcapacity, soft demand, and ongoing price wars. What is your strategy for steering Arkansas Best and ABF through this?
A: Both the industry and our company have been severely impacted by the length and depth of this recession. Our most experienced officers will tell you they have never seen a business climate as challenging as this one. Fortunately, we have managed the company conservatively and that has provided us with flexibility. We have remained focused on understanding what is important to our customers and finding a way to be an essential element of their distribution networks. Those are the things that have sustained us during this challenging period and will allow us to be successful in the future.

Summary: My, how times have changed. During the period immediately before this recession/depression, trucking was booming, drivers were scarce even while oil prices were high. Now, this industry is muddling through the trough laden with overcapacity. Even if and when the broader economy recovers, trucking will continue to remain in the doldrums until the excess capacity is discarded. If as Judy mentioned, that Arkansas Best has been managed conservatively, then it should be well positioned to ride out the lean years which in my opinion could last quite a while longer than people expect and especially for the trucking industry.

Steve Mulaik [Progress Group]

Q: What one key piece of advice would you offer a supply chain manager looking to set up a logistics network in India?
A: Always have a Plan B in your pocket. Things happen fast or they never happen at all in India. The problem is you never know which until the last second. Risk management is child’s play in the United States compared to what it’s like on the [Indian] subcontinent. Make it your organization’s mission to be prepared.

Summary: Now, I’m from India and have a fair idea of the business practices in my country and it is refreshing to hear a reflection on the enormous differences in the way things are done in different countries. And I agree strongly that Risk management here is child’s play in the US compared to other parts of the world. Just last week, I was at a party hosted by my uncle who spent a great deal of time with a non-profit in Sierra Leone (in the years leading up to the coup and war i.e. 1990s). There was one memorable line that I think captures the polar opposites of how different cultures operate – “Six days for the thief man, one day for the master.” The phrase means that workers might spend six days thieving from the master while the master has only one day to discover and put an end to it – lopsided, wouldn’t you say?

What I’ve always found surprising about the global supply chain is that it works. Somehow. Some sort of a shifting but workable common ground is found upon which this global supply chain marches forward. Corporations that are engaged in this global dance have somehow managed to persevere where decades and millennia of human endeavor has sallied and failed. I think there is an important reason for this – the transnational corporation has an operational sub-culture that in all matters non-operational is dissociated from the collision of cultures that is constantly taking place. What I’m saying is that as long as it was the members of the culture that attempted to create long supply chains, it kept tailing because culture carried a currency that rarely extended far beyond the borders of that culture. The transnational corporation is one of the ways in which this former feature of human experience has been transcended. And that is a significant breakthrough.

Wesley Randall [Auburn University]

Q: What advice would you offer a young person considering a career in logistics or supply chain?
A: Work hard, learn the basics, find a mentor, be willing to take a lateral job to learn a new skill, and don’t be afraid to go international. For my family, the time spent internationally was some of the best of our lives. And care about the people around you. I recently heard an executive from The Container Store say, "Culture eats strategy for breakfast". How true that is. There is an emerging realization that attracting and keeping talent is critical to sustained competitive advantage.

Summary: “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” That’s some major pawnage.

Rich Thompson [Jones Lang LaSalle]

Q: The conventional wisdom has been that the industrial property segment skirted much of the damage inflicted on the real estate market in the past two years. Is the other shoe about to drop, or has it already dropped?
A: In general, real estate values are down 30 percent across the board, and industrial properties have suffered as with the rest of the commercial real estate market.

Over the past five quarters, the majority of U.S. industrial markets have experienced rising vacancy rates, creating the potential for landlord cash flow issues. Based on how the debt is structured on properties experiencing these problems, we expect to see more foreclosures, loan defaults and public disclosure of these problems in the industrial market in 2010 and 2011.

Summary: If you’ve been following this blog, I think you’d easily agree that I’ve been harping about the implosion and non-recovery in the housing market, broader economy etc. In fact, for the better part of the past 12 months, this has been the constant on this blog. This is simply because, this implosion is ongoing – it’s not in the public eye because negativity (even if true) has a limited shelf life while positivity does not. As Rich says, these problems in the industrial and commercial can be expected to continue in 2010 and 2011. Well, I’d expect the real estate oversupply to last longer than that until some major driver of growth appears.

One anecdotal observation that I make is that people are snapping up real estate thinking that there are good deals available. It’s true that there has been a 20-25% decrease in property values but my study of asset values post bubbles is that it has to reach the point that it is considered a dead end and I just don’t think that it has reached that point stateside. Couple that with the fact that residential real estate is still largely unaffordable evidenced by the need for loans still offered at 3.5% down (FHA) and even 5% by private lenders – this market is still on life support. Consequently, when the most important investment that middle class families makes is treading water, what are the implications for the broader economy and the supply chains at large?

Of course, the new iPhone is selling like hot cakes – so go figure?

Who are this year’s Rainmakers? is a recent article about thought leaders identified by DC Velocity for 2010.

This year’s selections represent many different segments of the supply chain discipline: practitioners, academics, consultants, and vendors. But they’re also united by some common threads, including an emphasis on education, training, and people. Through word and deed, our 2010 honorees more than live up to the Rainmakers’ legacy of making a lasting contribution to the profession.

There is also a short Q&A with these professional’s, a sampling of comments that I found interesting are below:

Catherine Cooper [Ozburn-Hessey Logistics]:

Q: What do you consider to be the greatest obstacles to supply chain optimization?
A: One of the great challenges facing our industry is managing a supply chain with the new credit market constraints. With a restriction on working capital, we are seeing lower inventory levels than ever before, resulting in reduced supply chain cycle times and the need for networkwide item visibility. OHL’s customers are making radical changes in SKU [stock-keeping unit] assortments and sourcing methods. The old model of abundance has been replaced with one of scarcity, impacting every part of our industry.

Summary: Volatility is here. Is network visibility the answer? A very small “Yes” but what matters more is the network configuration. Some networks are more susceptible to volatility while others are not – I’ll leave that as an open question for my readers.

Mike Duffy [Cardinal Health]:

Q: What have you found to be the key differences between managing a consumer goods supply chain and a health-care supply chain?
A: For me, a supply chain is a supply chain. The vernacular is very similar, the principles are similar. The biggest difference is where an industry is when it comes to recognizing the role the supply chain can play in driving business performance. In consumer goods and other industries, we’ve identified the supply chain as a key enabler to driving business results. Health care is at a different place on the continuum. Most health-care providers came into existence to take care of patients first and were thrown into the business side of health care second. As a result, the industry as a whole is working to adopt best practices from the consumer products and other industries in order to leverage the supply chain to drive efficiencies and performance.

Summary: A supply chain is a supply chain. Except there is one significant difference arising this past year. The big government is about to slap its paw print over the healthcare supply chain. Anyone thinking about that?

Charlie Guardiola [Burlington Coat Factory]

Q: If you could offer one piece of advice to someone looking to jump-start their career in distribution or supply chain management, what would it be?
A: My advice would be to be a great businessperson first and then apply that business knowledge to the supply chain discipline. I believe that the best supply chain people are those who are great business people. Back when it was called "logistics" and not "supply chain," we were seen as warehouse guys who moved boxes from point A to point B. But things have really changed over the years, and now supply chain is seen as an integral contributor far beyond the four walls of the DC.

Summary: That is some really sound advice. Some of the others identified here talk about greater visibility, confronting volatility etc – that’s something that businesspersons don’t seem to understand all that well. I mean, they get the list of it but they don’t get the gist of it.

Peter D. Gibbons [Starbucks Corp.]

Q: What do you consider to be the greatest obstacles to supply chain optimization?
A: Two things come to mind: talent and coordination across the supply chain. The logistics field needs more well-educated logistics professionals with early hands-on experience who can understand quickly what needs to change and can implement change without negatively impacting customer service and cost.

On top of that, the ability to manage "total cost to serve" from product development all the way through to delivery onto a customer’s shelf is essential. The major change in the Starbucks food offerings over the last two years is a great example of balancing improvements to product quality with a supply chain solution that improved total costs and margin but allowed cost trade-offs, including better ingredients and quality.

Summary: I don’t think that he can say it but I can – Over the last two years, Starbucks learnt the lesson that practically every growth company learns sooner than later: Growth doesn’t last forever. But Starbucks has survived, somewhat, despite the threats from competitors because they’ve taken the value route. And the above is a précis of what initial steps of value discovery looks like.

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SupplyChainStandard.com has an article about a PRTM study that highlights five key supply chain challenges: PRTM study highlights five key supply chain challenges.

PRTM’s study titled Lessons Learned from the Global Recession (you can download a free copy of the report by registering) outlines a very real expectation that a survey of 350 manufacturing and service companies have right now:

… believe there will be a significant upturn in demand from their customer base as well as a significant increase in company profitability over the next few years.

From the study, the population considered,

The survey population is composed of organizations from a diverse set of industries, including aerospace,  industrial and automotive equipment, consumer goods, retail, electronics and semiconductors,  telecommunications, and health care.The survey’s global nature is reflected in the response population. Nearly 40% of respondents are senior executives in supply chain management within their company, with 15% at the CXO-level. Three major geographic regions—the Americas, Europe, and Asia—are each well represented within the survey respondents. And, while nearly two-thirds of survey participants are companies with annual revenues
greater than $1 billion, more than 10% have revenues less than $100 million.

The real question is whether this expectation from the survey is from the usual appreciation of business cycles that have long been through expansions and contractions – why must this time be any different? Or is it from a collective impression that things are getting better – something rooted in empiricism or the like? Whatever, it is, it is a valuable data point. Of course, what remains to be done is to take these responses and map them against a sampling of 10-K reports of public listed companies and see whether these words are matched by their actions.

Nevertheless, the study highlights five key challenges. They are:

1. Supply chain volatility and uncertainty have permanently increased
2. Securing growth requires truly global customer and supplier networks
3. Market dynamics demand regional, cost-optimized supply chain configurations
4. Risk management involves the end-to-end supply chain
5. Existing supply chain organization are not truly integrated and empowered

I’ll address the meat of these challenges in the next post.

I’m about as far as anyone can get from the professed purpose of this blog i.e. Supply Chain Management. However, there is a method to this peripatetic diversion that is biased to anything but Supply Chain Management. The truth, according to me, is that it really doesn’t matter whether you’re sourcing in China or India, or whether faulty gas pedals are being found in the Lunar Rover now or how Cadmium and Miley Cyrus’s jewelry came together and made their way hand in hand onto Walmart’s shelves.

What does matter though is the fire that is being stoked in the world’s markets? And the world of the supply chain is very tightly linked to this world market but one link removed.

Think for a minute in the sense that the world financial markets didn’t exist and we only had the physical market at hand. It would be an easy tell about the interconnectedness of the supply chain and the physical exchange and transfer of goods over the counter. But back to the real world, the financial markets act as an intermediary in the financing of production and transportation of goods (and of late services) all over the world and their direction to markets all around the world, valuing everything from the debt of governments as well as the stability of firms engaged in the very production of goods and so on. And right now, there is an epic battle being waged as to the control of these markets. And not for one minute are the powerful parties in this struggle disinterested parties to the outcome. The three parties to this struggle are the financial firms and banks that control (at the behest of their clients of course) huge amounts of capital, governments that supposedly represent their citizenry and control enormous tax receipts and perpetual debts or the general public that have their retirements and houses on the line here. The truth is that only the last party to this struggle has but a squeaky voice in all of this and is also the weakest link.

Yet, in all our theoretical supply chain hokum, it is the consumer that is the main driver of everything – and here in lies the troubling dislocation. The consumer is in dire straits and without a rebounding job market or ever rising asset class that can spring some liquidity, there’s just not enough juice to keep all of the supply chain links functioning.

I’m laughing right now (false bravado, really) but I posted the below graph to the day (See my blog post on April 27th: Two conflicting reports: Who decides?) of what must have been the sunniest day this side of the great recession. Compare the two charts of volatility, one from the last post and one from today.

April 27th, 2010	May 20th, 2010

And a close up of what has transpired in the last thirty days set against the recent past, below is the VIX from the beginning of the year:

That is nothing short of an explosion of fear in the financial markets. Do you feel the fear yet in the supply chains? It is coming.

And a quote from the previous post:

“I’m certainly interested in spending now that the stock market seems so relaxed,” said Dan Schrenk, an information technology consultant, as he stood outside a Best Buy store in the Portland suburb of Beaverton.

I wonder how Dan Schrenk is feeling today?

And how does my consequent statement look like:

As the left side of the above chart shows, complacency can last quite a long time and so cannot be read to indicate that something altogether violent and volatile is impending.

Well, I was wrong because something violent and volatile was brewing and it just made a first visitation. Now, we get to see how those Animal spirits will hold up. We also get to see, what this administration has in store for us and also what their allies in power all over the globe as well. I can hazard a guess, they will double down, even triple down their reckless attempts to save us (and their ill-gotten and ill-deserved gains). But given how far they’ve held up the sun, you can almost be sure that they can hold up the moon for at least half as long.

Now as for supply chains, you can be sure that if you’re not tabling business continuity plans that take into account financing, transportation and manufacturing disruptions, political games, street riots, tariffs, protectionism and the like, you’re about to get a rude awakening. I thought I’d never say this but Inventory is about to be king and the customer, well, he’s a serf now.

Supply chains, especially those that have become enormously complex over long distances don’t have to exist – it is not an iron clad feature of human experience. In fact, it might even be a bug – it hasn’t existed in human history but for the brief blip that has been this three decade or so experiment as well as the Silk Road but that had quite a different structure altogether.

Say it aloud, these supply chains don’t have to exist. And that’s the truth. Maybe, a different sort of supply chain will spring up – local and short instead of global and long. Or something else entirely.

So in the big picture, this sophistication in supply chain structure, technology and management is relevant because the scale and scope has been expanding these last thirty years and at a tremendous pace. As the need to understand, manage and control has grown, so has the need been met in this particular fashion. The promise of future continuing growth in both scale and scope is premised on reaching the unwashed masses – or those who are yet to attain to our supposed state of development. Yet, there is not any universal law of progress that dictates that it should be so – we could head in the other direction i.e. devolve to the state of underdevelopment of those we planned to grown to envelop.

So this is very much like a locomotive that is running at break neck speed on a track that is only being laid as the engine rolls forward with a lever attached to the locomotive itself. What’s more, we find that the need for speed has been met only by burning up the coaches that were once attached to the locomotive. Very soon, there will only be an engine running on inertia towards a track that is at an end.

The first report is from March 3rd of this year:

Panjiva cites decline in global shipments to U.S. from January to February. From the article,

There was a 3 percent decline in the number of global manufacturers shipping to the United States from January to February, according to data from Panjiva, an online search engine with detailed information on global suppliers and manufacturers.

This comes on the heels of a 3 percent decrease from December to January, a 3 percent gain from November to December, and a 1 percent decline from October to November. The 3 percent decrease from January to February is considerably better on a year-over-year basis, when there was a 10 percent decline.

and,

Panjiva also noted that there was a 4 percent decrease in the number of U.S. companies receiving waterborne shipments from global manufacturers. This follows a 7 percent decline from December to January and a 2 percent gain from November to December.

Panjiva CEO Josh Green commented in a blog posting that some caution needs to be exercised when viewing this data, as they are "somewhat misleading" due to global trade being in free fall last year at this time, coupled with the fact that "the absolute level of global trade activity remains well below where we were prior to the 2009 recession."
In an interview with LM, Green said that while it is a positive thing that global trade has emerged from the depths of the recession, Panjiva’s data suggests that global trade is following a seasonal path, although it is not returning to pre-recession levels. This, said Green, raises the question of whether or not what is currently happening is the new normal.

"We are moving sideways now and are not truly in a robust recovery," said Green. "The signs [of a true recovery] are not there yet. But we are not in panic mode anymore either."

Now, here is a report from yesterday from the New York Times: From the Mall to the Docks, Signs of Rebound

The docks are humming again at this sprawling Pacific port [Oregon], with clouds of golden dust billowing off the piles of grain spilling into the bellies of giant tankers.

In Portland, Ore., Kevin Weldon prepared soda ash for export. Exports rose in the first two months of the year by nearly 15 percent compared with a year earlier.

“Things are looking up,” said Dan Broadie, a longshoreman. No longer killing time at the union hall while waiting for work, instead he is guiding a mechanized spout pouring 44,000 tons of wheat into the Arion SB, bound for the Philippines.

and,

Exports swelled in the first two months of the year by nearly 15 percent compared with a year earlier, according to the Commerce Department.

Now, that’s two reports from two different sources that could be reconciled by some neat trick but what is that trick? Animal spirits? No, something more shocking – Imports are down and exports are up? Huh, what? Now, that’s a welcome change, one would think.

But Animal spirits are everywhere,

“I’m certainly interested in spending now that the stock market seems so relaxed,” said Dan Schrenk, an information technology consultant, as he stood outside a Best Buy store in the Portland suburb of Beaverton.

and,

On the other side of the country, at the Garden State Plaza mall in Paramus, N.J., Marie Bauer, who sells clothing for a living, was feeling similarly emboldened.

“I’m working more now,” she said. “I bought myself a watch.”

If that ain’t Animal Spirits, what is? One is boldly buying a watch. (a watch, mind you!!) while the other is calmed by the current state of the stock market. I suppose, I could be charitable and envision that it is not a Timex but a Rado but those are still imports in my book. As for the calm in the markets, that’s exactly how a sucking out of volatility from the market sounds and feels like. Look at the chart below:

When volatility is sucked out, there is much complacency in the market and the above quote is a good example of it. As the left side of the above chart shows, complacency can last quite a long time and so cannot be read to indicate that something altogether violent and volatile is impending.

At the cross-roads, which fork do you believe, let alone take?

The troubles continue despite the barrage of good news that is announced from any and every media outlet. The latest blow (or rather non-boost) to the story of good times are around the bend is: Consumer credit in US fell by most in three months.

From that article,

Consumer credit in the U.S. declined in February more than anticipated, indicating Americans are reluctant to take on more debt without further improvement in the labor market.

and,

The drop was the 12th in 13 months and shows consumer purchases, which account for about 70 percent of the economy, will be limited until households become more optimistic about the recovery. Confidence to finance spending may be restored if employment keeps rising after a March payroll gain that was the biggest in three years.

“I don’t think we’re going to have the credit-fueled spending we had in the past,” said Gary Thayer, chief macro strategist at Wells Fargo Advisors LLC in St. Louis. “A lot of consumers are deleveraging. They see excess borrowing as threatening.”

and lastly,

In 2009, credit-card write-offs increased 59 percent to $89 billion from $56 billion in the previous year, according to R.K. Hammer Investment Bankers, in Thousand Oaks, California. Write- offs and delinquencies typically track the unemployment rate.

Remember that the biggest boost from the stimulus as far as job creation was concerned was slated to be towards the end of 2009 and then tapers off into the first quarter of 2010 (Romer: Impact of stimulus will wear off and The end of the Great Recession). That means that this is the best consumer related effect that we should see – at least from the point of view of job creation filtering back into consumer demand. After that, the expectation will be that the economy grinds on under its own powers.

The masters of our fates seem wedded lock, stock and smoking barrels to the idea that all that needs be done is to rouse the animal spirits (that’s us folk, never mind the implied condescension). And like a bunch of wildebeests, we shall run off to our jolly lives, never mind the fire on the savannah. But there’s nothing left to spend except what one possibly brings in every paycheck and that is key. You haven’t been hearing the term jobless recovery (for a time, that was being used) – but a jobless recovery is a failed stimulus and that will be the tell.

However, there is something poignant about the term animal spirits for our masters use the term to really mean : enslaved spirits, blinders on and doing whatever they command without actually commanding us. The few of us who might be familiar with animals know that an animal, even a domesticated one, can be quite an unpredictable beast and a herd of animals can summon quite an unpredictable spirit. Wildebeests are easily spooked and they can set off on a gallop thither but they can also turn and run straight back at you and trample you underfoot. That’s animal spirits for you.

I was forwarded a note about a series of short clips, the first of which has been posted online. The purported intent of these clips is to give voice to the small (or smaller) ERP/SCM players in the face of the mammoths. Or as some marketers might have it – the Davids vs. the Goliaths with a Web 2.0 twist.

It’s refreshing to see the battle spread to the Web 2.0 infrastructure and done in a clever way as well.

Here’s the link: Suitemates.com