Do right and do well
I attended AMR’s annual Supply Chain Executive Conference in Phoenix last week where it was about 110 degrees each day! I’ve been to quite a few AMR conferences now, but this one was quite different. The theme of the event was “Making money and saving the world.”
To start with, former President Bill Clinton was the keynote. And he was excellent. You really have to appreciate someone that is so comfortable presenting and has such a command of facts/figures (ok, so we all assumed these were facts).
Clinton’s message was about inspiring everyone to change the world, by leveraging the collective skills and capabilities of the attendees (and their respective companies) to solve some of the major challenges facing the world today. It was a great, inspirational message. I’ll save the full details since there’s a good summary here at
eWeek.
Joining Clinton in supporting this visionary theme were executives from Hewlett-Packard and Procter & Gamble who discussed the impressive programs and efforts of their companies (HP around recycling and P&G dealing with the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina) in support of the conference’s theme and Clinton’s message to follow.
From there, the sessions moved to a more traditional operational focus - although the presenters were still key executives from companies like Siemens, Motorola, Best Buy and a host of AMR research staff.
In one session, an executive from Cisco described the elements of a supply chain as a competitive advantage as: collaborative, virtual, real-time data driven, adaptive and agile. These themes were consistent with other presenters.
Other key themes discussed were the growing complexity of supply chains as they truly have become global and outsourced and the unique challenges this presents in terms of risk management, reiliability, etc. In addition, everyone talked about the incredible pace of change and increasing competition and the premium it has placed on supply chain agility, supply chain visibility and the ability to sense and respond to change - themes I obviously enjoyed hearing.
Overall, a really different but very interesting event.
