4 New year's Resolutions for Supply Chain Professionals.

Coming up with a New Year's resolution is a popular tradition in many parts of the world. Usually, the focus is on improving our personal lives, such as losing weight, quitting smoking, or spending more time with our family and friends. But what about resolutions to help us improve at work?

If you’re a supply chain or logistics professional and you’re looking for ways to improve as a leader this year, here are my four things you should stop doing.

1. Stop viewing technology as a silver bullet

With so much innovation happening in technology, it’s so easy to chase the next new shiny thing, whether it’s artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), and countless other emerging technologies. But technology won’t solve your supply chain problems or help you improve unless you also address the most common culprits of poor supply chain performance: poor data quality, lack of resources and training, lack of metrics and accountability, and poor communication and collaboration with trading partners

2. Stop viewing logistics as a cost center.

The people who really need stop viewing logistics as a cost center are not the people in the front lines of supply chain and logistics (they already know it), but the CEOs and CFOs at manufacturing and retail companies. Yet most of those executives have never step foot in a warehouse or loading dock and would probably get lost trying to find it. Simply put, companies that continue to view logistics as just a cost center and put it at the bottom of their investment priority list, will experience a decline in customer satisfaction and loyalty, which will also bring down their market share and profitability.

3. Stop bullying your suppliers, carriers, and other trading partners.

Another new year's resolution to look out for is to stop bullying your suppliers, carriers, and other trading partners. Extending payment terms to 120 days or more. Bullying suppliers over price cuts. Taking a “I Win, You Lose” approach to negotiations. All of these actions might improve your financial performance in the short term, but as history has shown over and over again, bad things happen in the long term (quality issues, supplier bankruptcies, etc) when you increase the cost of doing business for your suppliers and trading partners but still demand price decreases from them.

4. Stop passing the buck on responsibility when it comes to creating socially responsible and ethical supply chains.

We’ve seen many examples in recent years where companies have passed the buck of responsibility to suppliers or other parties when supply chain issues related to labor, safety, environmental, or legal practices have surfaced When it comes to these types of serious supply chain problems, saying “I didn’t know” is no longer an acceptable excuse . If you want to create socially responsible and ethical supply chains, you have to develop a more granular and detailed understanding of your supply chains; you have to improve the way you communicate and collaborate with your suppliers, especially lower-tiered ones; and most importantly, you can’t outsource the responsibility — the buck ultimately stops with you, the brand owner.

Do you agree with these four things to stop doing? What else would you add to the list? Post a comment and share your perspective!

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Source: TALKINGLOGISTICS