You are running hard. As a supply chain leader you want your team to make progress and outpace the pack. One of the toughest challenges for the supply chain leader is building and retaining talent.
Managing a global supply chain team today is not easy. We find that 59% of companies are experiencing issues in training and retaining mid-management talent. One in three companies have open jobs that are taking nine to twelve months to fill. Talent is scarce and a new constraint. This is especially true in the areas of big data analytics, supply chain planning, and staffing centers of excellence.
Recruiting new-hires from schools is less of challenge than helping existing teams to rethink supply chain practices, to embrace new technologies, and make the digital pivot. To build the next-generation thinking requires learning a new language and new thought processes. Teams must rethink well-entrenched processes and technologies while building outside-in processes. So how does a supply chain leader build mid-management talent while driving the tipping point to define and execute next generation supply chain practices? It is a tough challenge. To help, we created a targeted, efficient solution that will meet this challenge.
At Supply Chain Insights research is our business. We sit on 15 years of supply chain financial data and over 6000 quantitative responses fielded in 68 survey instruments over four years. We are a small team focused on building research insights for the supply chain business leader. We are independent and focus on driving insights on next generation practices. Each week we share Open Content—newsletters, blog posts, reports, webinars—with the global community. In our research we try to not only tell you the “what,” but also the “So what.” We are actively trying to help supply chain leaders tie actions and choices in strategies to balance sheet results. Each year we host an annual conference to help supply chain leaders learn new concepts to make the digital pivot. However, we recently realized that we were not doing enough.
We know travel budgets are tight. Employees’ time is a constraint. As a result, we set out to bundle our research onto a e-learning platform which would allow supply chain organizations to learn in a meaningful way through social collaboration. It is for this reason we partnered with CorpU to deliver an e-learning platform.
When I went to the market to find a partner to deliver e-learning, the CorpU training program platform exceeded my expectations. The approach of short learning sprints with automated videos on a collaborative platform for short interaction is novel and right for today’s environment. The courses we have designed with CorpU are built as short sprints. Each class is a one-week program where employees spend 45 minutes online (via phones, tablets or workstations) in the learning platform, at their convenience, working with content which has been distilled to focus on only the most relevant subject matter. We’ve built a program that packs a concentrated punch in a virtual environment. This allows employees around the world to ideate on important topics, on their schedule, from anywhere in the world. In the training, Supply Chain Insights provides the research as a spark to enable a new conversation, and embeded online assessments to help employees gain perspective on the current state of their processes versus the wider population.
So, if you are a supply chain leader working on a next-generation supply chain project, consider using our courses in your organizational readiness program. You have many options:
- Driving a New Strategic Initiative. If you are driving a new strategic initiative, leaders can video themselves, put project charters and goals on the CorpU platform to customize the training, and then ask the team to drive collaborative conversations and learning on the research-guided programs that have been prepackaged through the efforts between CorpU and Supply Chain Insights.
- Online Benchmarking. If you are looking to gain an understanding of how your processes stack up against your peer group on alignment, agility, balance, ability to get data, supply chain visibility, time to make decisions, planning productivity, planning effectiveness, or supply chain financial benchmarks, this is a program which will allow you to see differences by business unit or geography to better understand your current state and compare it to the general market.
- Supplier Development. If you want to train your suppliers on next generation supply chain thinking, this program could augment your efforts. Build these short sprints into your supplier diversity or supplier development training materials.
- Driving Supply Chain Excellence. Excellence does not just happen. It must be carefully defined and honed over years. These courses can be used to help guide conscious choices and widen the horizons of employees on what is possible.
The courses, designed as fast sprints, are currently in development. The full course catalog will be complete by the Supply Chain Insights Global Summit. Stop by and test them out in the Digital Showcase.
Over the course of the summer we will be rolling out the courses through testing by ambassadors. In the ambassador program, companies will get a complimentary license to test the program and give us feedback in the early rollout phase. Each course will have 5-7 ambassadors with cohorts up to 50 employees per course. The seven courses currently in joint development between CorpU and Supply Chain Insights are:
- Supply Chain Metrics That Matter
- Building the Customer-Centric Supply Chain
- The Market-Driven Value Network Journey
- Making the Digital Pivot
- End-to-End Supply Chain Orchestration
- Driving Improvement in Decision Making Through Supply Chain Planning
- Building Agility Through Horizontal Processes Like S&OP, Supplier Development and Revenue Management
If you are interested in partnering with us and being an ambassador, reach out to test one of these seven programs. Please contact us by sending Regina Denman, Director of Client Services, an email at regina.denman@supplychaininsights.com to sign up.