You don’t have to be a fan or even keep up with the entertainment news to know about the stunt Kanye West pulled when he interrupted Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech for a video music award. Now, I’m no Kanye West fan and I know millions of people enjoy Taylor Swift’s music but I could not name one of her songs. I did however feel sorry for her when in a moment of glory she was hit with an unexpected, pain it the butt disruption that should just never have happened.
Now, if there was the “Kanye West Supply Chain Award” what or who would be deserving of such an award? Remember the criteria, unexpected, pain in the butt disruption. Here are my nominees;
1. Customer Request to Increase Demand. Yes, this can be unexpected and sometimes it can be a pain in the butt with the shortage conditions that are possibly created. You may think of it as a disruption but it is really part of doing business. You need to be ready to handle these types of requests since only good things come from a customer coming back for more.
2. Supplier De-commits an Order. This is always unexpected and as far as a pain in the butt, you’ll feel like you just got kicked on the backside by David Beckham. Although it is disruptive, again it is just something that supply chains need to respond to in time to make the right moves. Maybe you expedite, transfer or use an alternate. Although it feels like it is unexpected, you do know that eventually it will happen so you need to more prepared than Ms. Swift was when Kanye grabbed the microphone.
3. ERP Implementation. Certainly not unexpected but what it lacks in the unexpected makes up tenfold in pain in the butt disruption. What can take months or even years to complete can turn a choir boy into a Kanye West impersonator. The unexpected may come in delays and cost overruns.
4. Scope Creep. This is a risk for any supply chain software project and when it happens it can throw delivery dates into a tailspin. Sometimes it is unexpected and many times will cause disruption but can be avoided with the advice of some other blog posts on this site that tackle the subject.
5. Forecast Decrease. Do you look like a deer in the headlights when this happens? This is a pain nobody wants and those liability discussions are even worse than the Kanye West rant. Unfortunately it is yet another supply chain reality that you need to respond to in time to avoid, or at least minimize, the pain in the butt disruption that comes with it.
Should any of these qualify for the “Kanye West Supply Chain Award?” Did I miss something?
You know, maybe there is no room in supply chain for Kanye West? For supply chain professionals, unexpected change is simply a way of life and disruptions are handled with class and in time to make a difference. What do you think?
Cast your vote and maybe we will have the first winner…or loser…of this award.
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Tags: Supply chain flexibility, Supply chain risk management
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None of these seem to have the impact of what Kanye did. Some of these are self-created. For instance, many companies fail to plan for the B2B aspects of their ERP implementations until it is too late. In the late 1990s one of the largest appliance manufacturers implemented a new ERP solution – SAP, I believe. This was a multi-year project and with 6 months to go, they suddenly realized that they had not staffed for, nor planned for, the need to integrate their new ERP with their fully functional B2B program that 100s of business partners were connected through.
This is, perhaps, a great example of a self-induced “Kanye” in the supply chain. Unexpected (though it shouldn’t have been), Pain in the Butt (absolutely), and a disruption (you betcha!). Six months and nearly forty full-time consultants later the ERP migration went as scheduled along with a fully functioning B2B program with few, if any, glitches.
You’d think that these would be all in the past, but these types of disruptions are still very real and frequent today. Check out the recent research from AMR Research: http://bit.ly/cVBHz
Basically, it shows that 90% of High Tech companies experience delays with ERP projects due to B2B Integration issues. That’s an astronomical number considering it is a known quantitiy and can be planned for. Sometimes they pull their B2B folks off of B2B (how important is it REALLY?) and put them on the ERP project itself, only to find out later that they really needed them in the B2B space.
I guess bad behavior like Kanye’s is happening all the time. It seems we are addicted to it. So much so we do it to ourselves!
I would agree with Bryan, some of the disruptions you discussed may be self induced, although I would suggest that, as a “professional” supply chain manager many if not all supply chain interruptions can be predicted in advance and planned around. What it takes to do this is an outstanding collaboration network between 1rst, 2nd, and 3rd tier suppliers, and your sales staff/ multi tiered customer base as well as keeping a very watchful eye on economic and industrial news and learning how to decipher the information and how to react as a matter of course. As Bryan suggests ERP implementations are a real pain however as a supply manager you can plan for it if the implementer is willing to tell you what they are doing. A case in point we buy a rather critical electrical component direct from a supplier who didn’t want us to know about their SAP implementation however we learned about it through an independent distributor. We went from a JIT delivery scenario to building a 6 month buffer stock within 3-4 weeks. When the supply crunch came, our competitors were left out in the cold and wanting to buy our buffer stock; guess what, they weren’t for sale. This sort of business intelligence applies to almost everything I do in the market place and it works.
Bryan and Ron, thanks for the comments. It is interesting how many SC disruptions feel like surprises. Many processes are designed to run like clockwork but it is not always business as usual. Great strories. Ron, just goes to show that if you only know about things in time, you can do something about it. Thanks again for the comments.