Category: Supply Chain and Procurement

Lately, I’ve written about how sexy supply chain careers (and people!) can be; how the empowerment afforded by agility, better forecasting, and improved control has led to the evolution of the standard supply chain career, but now I want to talk more specifically about the evolution of its people.

Hiring in FMCG has come a long way from relying only on supply chain professionals with relevant experience in a specific industry. Now talent can cross over from food to non-food, and from small to large business and back again. We can really drill down into this fluidity by examining the current career paths:

At entry level, the supply chain career options are more diverse than ever!

Quite often a supply chain professional – graduate or not will ‘fall’ into a role and will work their way up the corporate ladder.

However there is a trend where more and more graduates are choosing one of two ways to specifically to kick start their supply chain career:

1. Pick a graduate scheme in an established company like Unilever or Kraft, or
2. Join a start up, maybe something in craft beers, startup businesses with rapid growth or similar businesses to Innocent drinks.

It’s no longer just the established go-to organisations providing valuable opportunities for supply chain professionals. Smaller companies can now give graduates much wider exposure to the whole supply chain. End-to-end experience shapes their learning, and enables better development of their problem-solving skill sets.

On the other hand, blue chip structures make it easier to learn the specific functions of the business. Smaller businesses may not have the benefits packages and structure of a corporate but they often have a more informal culture, with perks that can make the work place more fun. This can be a very strong pull to attract tomorrow’s talent.

Supply chain is becoming more influential and commercial

In my last post I wrote about how over the last few years, supply chain teams have had more direct contact with customers. A relatively new function known as the ‘customer supply chain’ has evolved over the last 6-8 years in larger companies. It’s attracting a whole new breed of supply chain professionals that can be both commercial, technical, and makes for some great career progression for individuals on this path (such as going on into sales or marketing roles and vice versa). This gives them more fluidity and a holistic view of the organisation.

Usually problems with the supply chain means bad news for business, so the need for skilled and accurate forecasting of supply has become seriously commercial, and customer demand planning is one of the roles that has come out of that. Those forecasters have to do better than the Met Office! So the skill sets that come from more technical roles can really come out to play for this type of role.

Professionals who have, up to now, travelled a more technical route, such as IT, analytics or consultancy, can be seen moving into these roles.

Organisations value supply chain professionals more

Supply chain professionals are no longer left in the shadow of the warehouse or factory; they’re being asked to apply their skills and knowledge in other areas instead.

Secondments in departments like marketing or finance provide professionals with a valuable holistic view of the business, making work more interesting for them, and they can really benefit organisations too.

For example, one of our candidates in supply chain went to work in the accounts/finance department on a secondment. While there, she identified an inefficient process already met by a report from the operations department. Would she have known about that report if she hadn’t worked in operations? Probably not!
Thanks to this type of success, some of our clients maximise on the opportunity to encourage secondments from within when members of the workforce move into internal projects or go onto maternity leave. This is a great way for all professionals to get new exposure and skills within a business.

Putting this into perspective

Clients often tell us they want to hire the Supply Chain Director of tomorrow, but that person will have to have exposure to all areas and not just be a specialist in one. Rounded experience by the time they get to a senior level is crucial to success for the appointment, the candidate, and ultimately the business. If you’re aiming to be a Supply Chain Director one day, make sure you’re on the right path and give me a call to talk about your options.

Thanks for reading. This post was originally published by Jayna on LinkedIn.

Don’t worry – we’re not going to try to convince you to stay or leave Europe. Instead, I wanted to take a look at the impact the upcoming vote may have on the availability of supply chain talent – regardless of the nation’s decision.

I went back and looked through our supply chain placements for the last two years to see where our candidates came from. Here’s what I found:

• 64% of placed candidates were from the EU
• 29% were local (British) candidates
• 7% were from the remaining international community

Since nearly two-thirds of all supply chain vacancies were filled with candidates from the European Union, over 70% when you include the rest of the world, any change affecting the international flow of talent into the UK deserves further investigation into the impact it will have on supply chain staffing and recruiting. Brexit is not the only challenge facing this vertical today; instead it is putting added emphasis on all other talent related trends such as, hiring plans and visa related regulatory requirements.

How could Brexit (stay or leave) effect the flow of future jobs?

The 2015 SCM World Future of Supply Chain Survey found that 40% of the UK based companies they surveyed planned to add to the headcount of their supply chain teams (including manufacturing, logistics, sourcing and planning jobs) in the next three years. Although those growth plans were not contingent on the results of the Brexit decision, they will be affected by its outcome.

A ‘leave’ vote will put immigration into the unknown, no dramatic changes are likely to happen in short term and in the long term it could be better for highly skilled employees from the UK which would be great to see. However, the system at the moment does tend to work well as it is (certainly from a Supply Chain Recruitment perspective) which raises the question:

What job trends do we expect to see in the short to medium term?

One outcome may be that highly skilled workers will be less attracted to come to the UK as changes may mean that they will be limited to work here for a few years (however long their visa’s last) before having to return to their home country.

Looking back to the past 5 years we have seen many global manufacturing businesses moved supply chain functions as per the business needs, for example planning, customer service/order processing functions have relocated from the UK to Europe and vice versa, will a ‘leave’ vote mean the relocation of more supply chain functions internationally and therefore displace the need for supply chain talent in the UK? Certainly another factor in my opinion.

What are the other factors to consider?

Salaries

Clearly, I’m no expert but everything I’ve read on the impact of a potential Brexit on talent is that no one knows exactly what will happen. For instance, effective April 2016, £35,000 became the minimum annual salary needed to qualify to apply for a permanent residence visa in the UK. Looking through the placements we’ve made in the last 2 years the majority of supply chain placements fall in the £25,000-£40,000 range, and would be affected by this increase in threshold. There have been concerns raised about talent shortages that would be associated with the new salary threshold as well as the changes to immigration that may be driven by Brexit.

If it is so hard to know exactly what will happen after the vote, why should we try to predict the impact of Brexit on something as specific as supply chain talent?

Education

Naturally there will be a delayed response on the impact of Brexit from both Supply Chain candidates and employers who are waiting to see what leaving the EU will actually mean for them. If we take Education for instance, many professionals in the UK ‘fall into’ working in supply chain roles after graduating in other, often unrelated – degrees compared to a high proportion of European candidates. You would expect there to be a period of uncertainty while the UK market up-skills its existing supply chain self-sufficiency if the EU is no longer a viable to source talent.

Quality of talent

As all supply chain professionals know, supply and demand are affected by many forces that ultimately determine price and quality. Talent management is no exception. Having several factors to account for in the availability of high caliber, qualified talent certainly doesn’t reduce the challenge or uncertainty for companies trying to recruit the best talent available on the market.

There is a lot of debate about the impact Brexit will have on employers and their prospective employees; while we’re not in placing ourselves in the ‘stay’ or ‘leave’ camp, we’re definitely asking for companies and candidates to give some extra thought to the impact these changes will have on supply chain recruitment in the years to come.

On a slightly lighter note, I came across this post on social media over the weekend and thought it was amusing analogy:

We have all been on a night out with that mate who when you are in a club says “it’s shit here” let’s go somewhere else. Then when you leave you realise he has no idea where to go and the place you left won’t let you back in. Without a decent follow up plan a leave vote could see the UK standing in a kebab shop arguing about who’s fault it is.

I can see the point and from our perspective, we’d certainly like to know where our next drink is coming before leaving the club!

Picture this:

At the end of a busy workday, a woman walks into a shop next to the train station to buy a cold drink before her commute home. She goes straight to the fridge to grab a Coca Cola the way she has many times in the past. But today – the shelf is empty. “You’ve got to be joking,” she thinks to herself. “When is there ever no Coke?”

Just then, the assistant comes walking up from the back room pushing a trolley stacked high with Coke. “I’m sorry “he says, handing her a Coke. “The delivery was late today.”

How often do any of us really stop and think about the complex, sophisticated set of operations that make up any one supply chain, let alone the thousands of supply chains we depend upon on a regular basis? Everything we need – from food and drinks to clothes and building materials – it all has to start somewhere and then move through a number of steps and locations to reach its final destination.

Supply chains are impressive and frequently taken for granted, but could they possibly be sexy?

When we look at the level of influence that the supply chain has on an organisation, it’s amazing that supply chain professionals are not among the most highly celebrated and recognised members of the corporate team. Supply chain professionals have control over corporate resources, both inbound and outbound, and responsibility for all the operations required to make a raw material into a shiny new product.

The rise of the Internet and the resulting wave of tech start-ups has caused us to re-examine the sex appeal of the traditional ‘geek’ profile. The wardrobe of a software engineer or a supply chain professional may not be featuring on a runway anytime soon, but we’ve come to regard tech intelligence with an awe that has elevated the ‘cool factor’ of people lucky enough to apply their skills successfully. With their ability to drive costs down, agility up, and forecasts closer to the predictable horizon, supply chain professionals deserve equal ‘cool’ regard.

Supply chains often originate in some of the most exotic parts of the world. As the result of globalisation, a company is just as likely to deal with a factory in the Far East or a sugar producer in the Caribbean, and while many of those locations have intrinsic sex appeal, so do the logistics that move goods from them to processors and consumers around the world.

Take almost any product in our environment – cosmetics, a designer handbag, or even a bag of Walker’s crisps – not only did the raw materials or packaging likely come from another part of the world, they may have traveled through multiple countries on their journey to becoming the object you now hold in your hand. Supply chain has gone through an evolution that led them from vertical integration to something that resembles a virtual operation.

There was a time when a food producer would only hire supply chain professionals that had experience in their industry, and the same would be true for a fashion or jewellery company. Now, however, it is increasingly common to see supply chain professionals working in industries that they have no previous experience in, for example someone with a food background can secure a role in a cosmetics business. This enables businesses to take best practice and value add from different supply chains, adding value and improving their own operation as well as being able to offer skills development and new experiences for each employee.

There is nothing simple about a successful modern supply chain, demand is unpredictable, lead times are long, and it would seem that everything – from soft cheeses to high end designed accessories – is ‘perishable’. Only supply chains, and the professionals that keep them running, make our standard of living possible.

Supply chain is at the heart of everything, it is cool, interesting and empowers the professionals in its ranks to make a real difference in business. In fact, supply chain professionals are often so focused on making success possible that they don’t stop to invest in their own brand or image.

As a result, supply chain is sometimes portrayed a bit boring or dry, a perception that could not be further from the truth. As we’ve discussed, supply chain is equal parts smart, exotic, influential, and diverse – making it undeniably (but unpretentiously) sexy.

This article was originally published by Jayna on LinkedIn.