ASCM Day 1: If it’s Monday, it must be Las Vegas

I am now full on in the fall conference season. Last week, I was in Park City, Utah at Dematic’s Material Handling & Logistics Conference. This week, I’m in Las Vegas at the ASCM event (while my colleagues are at CSCMP). Two down, two more to go.

The backdrop to this morning’s event was the drone bombing of oil fields in Saudi Arabia. I realize that it is without question a serious political event, one with potential military implications. I keep seeing the phrase: Locked and loaded on my hotel room TV screen. But, look at it another way and it’s a supply chain event. After all, oil prices will rise, at least in the short run, and as supply chains run on oil, it could impact supply chains as we go into the critical weeks before the kickoff to the peak holiday season.

More specifically, it’s a risk event – watching the news, I wondered how long it will take the oil refineries to come back on line - and risk management is clearly on the minds of supply chain managers these days. There are several sessions related to risk management at this year’s event, the first since APICS was re-organized as ASCM. It’s also one of the three areas supply chain managers are going to be called upon to focus on in the coming years, according to Abe Eshkenazi, ASCM’s CEO. “Risk and resiliency are going to be more important to the chief supply chain officer as sustainability has expanded to include much more than just an enterprise’s carbon footprint,” Eshkenazi told me this afternoon. “It’s about the sustainability of the enterprise, and that’s going to be a supply chain priority.” The other two, by the way, are transparency and visibility, as supply chains must be aligned with business objectives and reach all the way back to the end customer.

The drone bombing also highlighted the fact that supply chains are more global than ever: An event in Saudi Arabia may very well impact what you and I pay for the products on the shelf in the not so distant future. Whether it was by design, globalization was a theme this morning, at least in the sessions I attended. I began the morning with a session by Jamey Butcher, the executive vice president of Chemonics International, about applying new technologies, like drones and IoT to last mile logistics. But this was not about FedEx or UPS getting you and me an online order; Chemonics has developed for USAID the supply chain that delivers life-saving medical products to some of the most remote and under-developed areas in the world. One of Butcher’s slides was anything but high tech: A small caravan of camels crossing a river in Ethiopia to deliver mosquito netting into a remote area. But the organization is also experimenting with drone deliveries of much need supplies into areas without an infrastructure. By applying best practices used in the commercial world to this supply chain, Chemonics has achieved a 90% on time delivery rate, and is furthering the education of its 1,200 supply chain professionals world wide with an online master’s program developed with Arizona State University. The group touts a 80% completion rate.

That session was followed by Fareed Zakaria, the CNN expert on foreign affairs and the morning’s keynote. Zakaria deftly avoided politics while walking attendees through the current state of the world. One thing he said left a lasting impression, and it has a supply chain implication. He noted that for the first time that he can remember, the U.S. has a credible economic challenger in China. He also noted the investments China is making in infrastructure and technologies, including AI, which promises to transform our profession. Consider this: “China has four times the people as the U.S., and the Chinese generate three times the data as we do in the U.S. because they leapfrogged analog and went right to digital,” he said. “I AI and machine learning depend on data to advance, who is going to win that battle.”

Before lunch, I had the chance to meet one on one with Eshkenazi. When I asked him what is top of mind, I expected to hear something about technology. Instead, Eshkenazi noted the relationship between supply chain professionals, organizations like ASCM and the academic institutions charged with educating the next generation of supply chain professionals. Indeed, he noted a generational divide between the current crop of executives, who primarily came out of engineering or finance, and the up and comers who graduated from supply chain programs.

At first glance, it’s never been a better time for the profession: “We’re in the middle of as hot a market as we’ve ever had,” Eshkenazi said. “There are 500 supply chain programs, plenty of students, a 90% placement rate and starting salaries that are second only to engineers. It’s hard to explain that there’s a problem.”

However, he noted that there’s a disconnect between what students are learning, which is over-weighted on technology and analytics, and what executives are telling ASCM they’re looking for. “Students coming out are under-weighted on critical thinking, a global perspective and real world experience.”

There’s that global thing again. But more importantly, it highlights both the challenges and the opportunities for all of us in the industry going forward.