The most significant threat facing supply chain
management is a lack of skills, but effective HR management has a major role to
play in helping the industry develop its own experts.
“Increasingly, companies are realising the extent to
which supply chains integrate industries and sectors,” says SAPICS President
Cobus Rossouw, commenting on the transition in the role of supply chain
professionals from functional professionals (think production and inventory
control) to integration specialists.
“And for this reason there’s a rush on supply chain
professionals right now, with companies across a variety of industry sectors
scrambling to hire people with supply chain expertise.”
As such experts are hard to come by, Rossouw says it
makes sense for companies to start developing the supply chain management
skills of their existing employees rather than to focus exclusively on spending
a lot of time and resources on hiring external experts.
A phased approach
“Knowledge exchange is a key ingredient to the process
of developing the skills of your internal supply chain professionals,” says
Rossouw. “For those who are not ready to take the plunge into gaining a formal
supply chain management qualification, we recommend work experience training,
where organisations take the time to assess their employees’ skills levels and
train them to turn their passion for the industry into contributions that make
business more integrated and profitable.”
Integrating HR with SCM
Integrating human resources management with supply
chain management is critical to ensuring that the desired skills are identified
and plans made to develop them. Developing one’s people according to industry
best practice is imperative in achieving strategic business goals due to the
fact that the successful management of both businesses and supply chains rest
on the performance of people.
However, this requires businesses to realise that
managing the people in a supply chain is as important as managing overall
strategy. “Line managers need to realise the fact that HR managers can help employees
understand the business strategy as applicable to their role.”
“Where technology and systems are increasingly the
same, it’s becoming more apparent that companies with good HR practices are the
ones that outperform others. That’s because they regard their people – and by
extension HR - as critical to their business function.”
Innovative learning opportunities boost supply chain
skills
Rossouw says HR professionals are becoming
increasingly innovative in the learning and development programmes that they’re
introducing in their organisations. It’s for this reason that SAPICS is holding
the Supply Chain Management Education Excellence Awards in May this year
(SCM|EEA – www.scmeea.org.za). The SCM|EEA aims to recognise companies and
individuals who contribute to alleviating the skills crisis in the profession.
However, if a formal approach to learning is
preferred, a variety of short courses, skills programmes, workshops and other
learning opportunities in the science of supply chain management are available
to the industry.
