Why Use Supply Chain Consultants ?
If you're using a supply chain consultant who, to quote the familiar adage, borrows your watch to tell you the time (and some of them are still about), then frankly, you're using the wrong consultant. No half decent supply chain consultancy firm can afford to develop a reputation which sounds vaguely like that tired cameo. Although consultants' capacity to give authoritative, value added ex pert advice is key, we've found over the years that an increasingly important assignment winning criteria is a supply chain consultancy's ability to DELIVER implemented solutions (the results, the savings etc.), not simply write reports.
The objectivity and independence offered by supply chain consultants can often be highly beneficial particularly when the challenges facing an organisation are especially political. Its reassuring to know that a supply chain consultancy doesn't bring any political baggage or tunnel vision with it.
Look for supply chain consultants who have specialist expertise in the particular discipline that you're interested in addressing. Beware though, whilst clients tend to think their particular industry has features which make it unique, they can miss significant opportunities by being too prescriptive by insisting that the consultants already have product or industry specific expertise.
In practise supply chain consultants know that many benefits arise from translating learnings between industries. If a supply chain consultant's reference frame is limited to one or two industries, they may not know that the particular challenge they are currently facing is routinely addressed by a solution employed in another industry. Slightly different perhaps, but probably useable nonetheless. Consultants with strong retail industry expertise for example, may be able to bring enormous value to say manufacturing businesses who have significant problems with redundant inventory caused by very short new product introduction lead times. A supply chain consultant with asset management expertise from a petrochemicals background will probably be able to bring significant learnings to the management of infrastructure in say the utilities sector, or visa versa.
Few client companies are large enough to maintain the sort of level of expertise in every aspect of supply chain management that a specialist supply chain consultancy will be able to offer, simply because of the variety of assignments that their consultants work on, and the rapid learning and sharing of learnings that occurs as a result. This means that supply chain consultants have access to the most advanced intellectual property in their field and are able to advise of state-of-the-art technologies.
This said, there are plenty of big reputable "blue chip" companies who have been first to implement the latest generation of "all singing - all dancing IT panacea" recommended by their supply chain consultants and who have been badly burned by the experience. J Sainsbury have been reported as being in this category.
Some of the smartest businesses get most benefit from their chosen supply chain consultancy by taking time to embed methodologies that address the root causes, eliminating waste on the one hand and building-in value adding activities to processes on the other. By contrast there are supply chain consultants who can be seen offering the "out of the box" or even the bespoked technology fix, which whilst it may provide untold functionality, in practise will probably never be fully used and in the final analysis, often simply automates non-value adding tasks rather than eliminating them. So watch out for "big ticket" technologies that will solve "all your problems". In fact, unless the changes are addressed very carefully, they can create just as many problems as they solve.
Supply chain consultants have to be good at lots of things, and particularly at gathering factual data and analysing it. Understandably most managers are too busy addressing their operational challenges, rather than spending time rooting through reams of data and constructing pivot tables. A good supply chain consultant will be able to "stand back" from the heat of operational pressures and dispassionately, gather and sift through reams of data to identify the problems, their root causes, and propose the most appropriate route forward.
But of course, that's not all there is to it.
Much of the role any supply chain consultancy assignment is to persuade the business to make the change it suggests. And there's far more to this than developing an "all singing - all dancing" PowerPoint presentation. In fact it can be more challenging than identifying the technical solution. It means communicating carefully, building the right relationships with key stakeholders quickly, understanding what their pre-conceptions are, and influencing them through the process, and getting their "buy in". Not everyone has the sort of interpersonal skill-set to do this, particularly when they're under lots of pressure to deliver in tight time-scales. We've found that its vital that our supply chain consultants have this mix of both the technical expertise, and the relationship building/communication skills.
Executive Interims - Supply Chain Practice
In addition to providing interim management services, Executive Interims - Supply Chain Practice provides clients with consultants formerly from "Big Four" consultancy firms, including:
Considering Supply Chain Consultants ?
Executive Interims - Supply Chain Practice is a specialist provider of supply chain consultancy and interim management services. If you'd like to know more about what our supply chain consultancy services can do for your business, contact us to explore the subject further.
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