How often have you tried to get your CEO, or someone who can influence the CEO, to listen to new ideas? In today’s fast paced, crisis around every corner of the world it can be extremely difficult.

You understand the gains that can be realized from a supply chain transformation project. The supply chain is your area of expertise, and you are intimately aware of the day to day challenges your team faces and the opportunities available.

You Need To:

·         Set personal targets related to overall company profitability and supply chain efficiency.

·         Drive consistent information right across the organisation about future supply and demand patterns.

·         Ensure everybody in the organization speaks the same language about your products, supply network, inventory targets and service levels. 

How you accomplish these needs is the difficult part and to do so you need buy-in from the top. There should be structural changes, attitude and cultural changes, and new technologies in place. These are details you know; details that must be shared with your CEO. It’s vital your CEO fully understands the potential - it’s only when he/she is “sold” on the huge gains and can visualise them happening the necessary investments can take place—because they are the only ones who have the power to say “this is going to be done, and nothing will be allowed to get in the way of it.” For the average supply chain director, these words from your CEO would be a dream come true.  So how can you get there?

Beyond the Status Quo

Your supply chain today is a product of your company’s history. In well established companies the terminology or language of supply chain didn’t exist when the networks were first developed.  Supply chain thinking is a modern phenomenon fighting against years of old fashioned culture and status quo.

To exploit the massive potential gains from a transformed supply chain everybody in the organisation will need to think differently and be prepared to do new things as part of their daily working lives, and that’s a very difficult thing to achieve. But it can be done. Think of the very first time you sat in the driver’s seat of a car and suddenly realized how hard it was to coordinate brake, clutch, accelerator, steering wheel, indicators, mirrors, etc, and … all of a sudden you were moving forward fast, but you didn’t feel in control! Plus, you had to learn all the rules of the road and work out how to avoid the impatient drivers who were cutting you up as you learned to drive!

That probably seemed impossible during your first few minutes (you probably wondered how your instructor made it look so simple), you might have felt it was too much for you and it would never happen. But after a while you got there, you passed your driving test. Driving has now become second nature to you (you’re even teaching others how to drive!). The same can be true of supply chain transformations. They can be equally daunting to begin with, but the rewards can be amazing. 

The Prize

So you have to get your CEO to understand the size of the prize, to get him to think differently. The financial crisis of the past few years has helped bring supply chain issues to the boardroom, usually because of a crisis around working capital, customer service levels, inventory write-offs, and more. 

Your job as a supply chain leader is to now seize on this opportunity and get your CEO to fully understand what a transformed supply chain can do for the organization. You need to become an evangelist and build support for your views, but you have to make sure the CEO gets it. Get help from outside if you need to. Take it beyond cost control and start talking about growth and revenue opportunities.

Don’t limit your thinking on this; shoot for the stars. Tell your CEO to tear down departmental silos and support a more effective sales and operations planning (S&OP) process. Educate your CEO so they can educate stakeholders about what can be achieved - to become a champion for supply chain thinking. Get them to build the company’s future around a world beating supply chain. You know it makes sense, why shouldn’t your CEO too?

Contributed by: Jonathan Jackman, EMEA Sales Director, Logility Supply Chain Solutions