A Plan for Successful Future

Supply chain needs to enable the business to expand its distribution footprint, tap newer markets and ship smaller loads at higher frequency, be it at a higher cost. Leanness of supply chain gets a whole new definition here.

If your business growth is driven by launch of new products at break-neck speed, the supply chain’s core competency should be to develop external manufacturing partners, while driving strong in-house planning, logistics, and R&D.

For companies on steady growth trajectory, incremental improvements in bottom-line are driven by efficiencies in supply chain operations, efficient sourcing practices, greater data visibility, etc. Collaborating with technology partners becomes a key factor to avoid big investments upfront and keep the supply chain lean. A lean supply chain has direct influence on product cost, working capital and capital expenditure, hence, helping the business to drive its Hedgehog concept much harder.

3. Please elaborate on the challenges that the organizations will need to address related to Logistics function.

Answer to this question deserves one full edition of a magazine. Still, in order to put it briefly in bullet-points, I can think of the following challenges:

• Talent and People Capability: With the kind of expansion as well as transformation this sector is undergoing, both quantity and quality of talent is going to be the single biggest challenge. On one hand, logistics professional need to be equipped with hands-on experience in machine learning, data analytics and IoT, on the other hand, they need to come equipped with the capability to understand the length, breadth and depth of the Business.

• Service Providers & Partners: The capability of business partners to keep pace with an organization’s change in business models and requirement will be another challenge. An organization’s need for bespoke transportation and warehousing solutions, will require it to involve it partners at a very early stage of ‘thinking’, which comes with its own constraints.

• Organization’s growth aspirations: Logistics can easily become a bottleneck in an organization’s growth aspirations, when these aspirations are not explicitly communicated and understood well in-advance and when these are not translated into a well-defined supply chain strategy.

4. What are the major tasks for organizational CIOs at this point in time?

First and foremost, CIOs need to transform themselves from being implementation leaders to business leaders. Essentially, they need to move from process re-engineering and driving cost efficiencies to owning and driving business results.

In order to drive revenue and profitability, CIOs need to create an ecosystem, which brings out right information and actionable insights across various functions, by exploiting data and visibility.

When this is done effectively, their next major task is to envision a technology road-map for the organization. And since this technology road-map owes its origin to the business priorities, it will have a complete buy-in and sponsorship of the CEO of the organization.

I also strongly believe that one of the major tasks a CIO has is to exponentially improve the affinity of the people towards technology. One of the biggest reasons behind the failure of a technology in a company is the inability of the users to adopt, adapt and accept it. So, a CIO has to ensure that the technology or the tool makes people’s life easy, fun and smooth. And for the people to know that, he needs to hard-sell this to them.

Whenever I talk to my teams about technology, I always give them the example of all the popular social networking sites and messengers. Nobody ever needed a trainer or a CIO for them to adopt these technologies.

This is supposed to be the benchmark for a CIO when it comes to technology implementation in organizations.

5. What is your advice for budding technologists in the logistics space?

Though I am nowhere near being a veteran, I am very much impressed with the new-age talent in the logistics space. The budding leaders in this space are highly aspirational, have amazing learning agility, have a broad perspective and possess a fair degree of clarity at a young age.

My advice to them would be to embrace the reality of fading boundaries between logistics, business, and technology. Logistics is business and business is technology. And hence, they cannot take the risk of choosing one of these and going after that. They need to develop themselves into leaders who have strong hold on all three.

Another advice would be to break the shackles of ‘process’. Since times immemorial, supply chain professionals have been proudly associating themselves as process-driven, SOP-focused and Follow-set-rules-of-the-game kind of breed. It’s high time that the folks move out of this closet and turn themselves into creative mavericks, questioning all boundaries and processes, to achieve transformational results. And since being process-driven is in their DNA, they have the capability to be absurd while staying within the bounds of policy and compliance.

But this capability can be developed best when they are budding managers.