Session Abstracts

Craig Barkacs: How Well Do You Think You Negotiate?
Negotiation for supply chain professionals is a critical competency. Feedback following a negotiation is often non-existent or misleading, so assessing how well one negotiates may be more subjective speculation than objective evaluation. In fact, research indicates that most people do not negotiate effectively and that, when put to the test, managers in today’s business world achieve the proverbial “win-win” outcome less than four percent of the time. This session will review and reinforce concepts and skills associated with successful negotiations, in addition to identifying mistakes and misperceptions common to sub-optimal negotiations.

Even if one is well-grounded in the fundamentals of negotiations, further benefit is derived from closely examining some of the nuances and variables that may be at play in a negotiation. Understanding ways to achieve not just a good outcome, but also the best possible outcome, are invaluable. Of course, achieving that best outcome is subject to a variety of factors. High-powered or multi-faceted negotiations often require special attention to, or emphasis on, particular themes.  We will focus on issues of leadership, ethics and trust, dealing with difficult people and circumstances, problem solving and creativity, multi-party negotiations, and cross-cultural negotiations. The learning environment is interactive and experiential, and includes open discussion, negotiation simulation, and direct feedback.

Rob Case: The Journey to World-Class - From Leveraging Volume to Leveraging Ideas
The recent economic downturn has provided an opportunity for supply chain professionals around the world to demonstrate their value to the corporation. Unfortunately, many companies have resorted to the age-old technique of opportunistic pricing, squeezing suppliers out of any profit they may have made. Truly world-class companies tend to follow a longer term strategy; taking advantage of lower prices of raw materials where available but focusing more on working in collaboration with key suppliers to find breakthrough cost solutions. This presentation will focus on how great companies successfully conduct Cost Challenges by harnessing the inherent knowledge of the extended enterprise. It will cover the AIM & DRIVE process of developing collaborative cost management strategies, how to follow up with suppliers, how to document ideas and leverage them across current and future products or services.

Helen Eckmann: Mentoring - Unlocking Your Potential
In this highly interactive session, the concept of mentoring across the generations will be addressed in order to provide you with strategies and perspectives to help you maximize your professional development through the dynamics of effective mentoring. "Old School" mentoring was described as a one-way, intentional exchange of information between a veteran and a rookie in an organization. New School mentoring has expanded to become an organic, multidirectional, intentional exchange spanning across both experience and the four generations. In the new model, we find that the young rookies in organization have as much to teach the veterans as the other way around. As a result of this session, you will be able to design and/or benefit from a robust mentoring program.

Dawn Evans: How to Keep Your Seat in the Board Room
What are Supply Chain best practices today? One thing’s for sure, it is not business as usual. This session will examine principles of excellence exhibited by Sourcing Interests Group (SIG) members. We’ll explore SIG members’ newest and tried-and-true habits from both a leadership practice and principle perspective. How are they leading through change? What principles are they applying now?

This session will examine critical leadership traits identified in SIG’s study of sourcing leaders, and share how these traits are exemplified in the board room. We’ll also explore key principles of negotiation excellence, risk management, total cost of ownership, corporate social responsibility, and positioning of strategic relationships. In addition, we’ll discuss the shift from transactional to transformational leadership found in world-class supply chains.

This session will provide you “take it home and use it” leadership guidance and case studies, and includes a participatory best practices round table.

Michele Flynn: How to Protect Your Extended Enterprise - Techniques to Manage Supplier Risk
Supplier Risk Management is more than just a hot topic, it is a critical business issue. Complex global supply chains and service contracts for outsourced functions have elevated the importance of risk management to its current level of criticality in a way that is unprecedented in history. Whether it’s compliance with the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) that triggered $1.6B in fines for Siemens AG, or the civil penalties that CFOs are now subject to under SOX, the stakes are rising rapidly. There are a multitude of risks - operational, financial, technical, regulatory and more that supply chain managers are now responsible to identify, measure, manage and mitigate. This session will focus on the steps that companies can take to classify and categorize risk to drive strategy and allocate resources. Participants will learn about different approaches to risk assessment and management that are being applied in real-life situations and how they can implement solutions to minimize corporate exposure cost effectively.

Rey Huerta: SCM - Truth is Not Reality, Truth is Perception
Although Supply Chain Management (SCM) is well recognized as a key element of today’s business, there are still a lot of misperceptions about SCM. If we ask different people to describe or explain what is SCM, you may be surprised at the variety of answer, from SCM being sourcing, procurement, warehousing/distribution to transportation. All of these are components of SCM, but SCM is more than the sum of its parts.

Perhaps SCM should be redefined to mean, “Super Cash Management”, because it impacts cash-to-cash flow - the time you get paid from the time you have to pay! In many industries the cash tied up in the value of your inventory and the cost of storing, managing and delivering is by far the biggest impact to your cash flow.

Six Sigma tells us, “If you do not measure it, you cannot improve it.”

In this session, we will examine why many companies today still have not been able to achieve best practice SCM. There are many reasons, but in many cases we find they are not measuring their SCM, or their SCM goals are based on where they are and making incremental improvement targets, versus a zero-base analysis of where they could be. Six Sigma is a great tool for Defining, Measuring, Analyzing, Improving and controlling your SCM zero-based analysis.

Lisa Napolitano & Axel Thoma: Customer Supplier Collaboration - How Smart Relationships Drive Competitive Advantage
Excelling at strategic supply chain management means overcoming the traditional mindsets and tactical behaviors of buying. Participants of this session will first gain a deeper understanding of how leading suppliers pursue their key customers through strategic customer management ─ the pendant to supplier management. Based on this holistic understanding of how both customer and supplier approach their interaction, a practically validated framework of value co-creation will be discussed. The framework helps to move people and processes away from buying and selling toward a strategic dialogue about value co-creation. Small groups work will then emphasize ways to improve alignment between customers and suppliers ─ an important enabler of value co-creation.

Participants of this session will walk away with a deeper understanding of how suppliers enact strategic customer management, a value co-creation framework to rethink their current interaction mode with suppliers, and concrete ideas to drive alignment with key suppliers.

Anshu Prasad: Embedding Advanced Analytics Techniques into Supply Chain Improvement Programs
Over the course of the last two decades, A.T. Kearney's Assessment of Excellence in Procurement (AEP) benchmarking study has revealed that industry leaders consistently design and incorporate advanced analytics techniques into their supply chain strategies to maximize business results.  Key components to leaders' success have been their ability to develop and make sense out of massive amounts of data from internal processes, customers and suppliers to drive strategic decision making in their supply chains.  In this session we'll examine two of these strategies:  Predictive Modeling of Customer Behaviors and Collaborative Optimization of Supplier Capabilities.

Predictive Modeling is an analytical approach that can help us to examine our customers' behaviors and actions to better structure our supply chains to meet their needs.  Through a combination of detailed data collection (e.g., sku's, customer loyalty programs, demographic data, etc.) and analyses, we can produce practical analyses and predications of future customer behavior.  Predictive Modeling techniques allow an organization to truly understand its customer base and its potential behaviors, providing answers to key questions, including:

• What is the best way to segment my customers and do these customer segments require different supply chain strategies?
• What products, services and marketing initiatives will be optimal for each segment?
• What factors/ elements in my supply chain most impact customer retention and/or attrition?

The capacity to know and to anticipate customers' behavior can positively drive the effectiveness of an organization's supply chain. 

Collaborative Optimization (CO) techniques with key suppliers, as well as complex categories, have proven to be a successful strategy to enhance the collaborative gateway between suppliers and buyers.  The process marries the use of strong analytics with enabling technology and functional knowledge to create an increased level of transparency during the sourcing process.  As a result, both the buyer and supplier achieve optimal conditions(s) to satisfy their individual business needs based on existing business constraints.

CO can be an arduous process which is not for the faint of heart.  It requires a tremendous amount of data collection and analyses, as well as advanced scenario development.  However, upon completion organizations are immediately able to see how their business constraint(s) affect their supply base, processes and associated logistics and more importantly, their bottom line.  As a result, this approach speeds decision making as well as implementation.

CO has been used for a number of categories including print, packaging, transportation and labor, as well as more complex categories such as marketing services.

In this session we will leverage client case studies to discuss the optimal conditions that lend themselves to incorporating Advanced Analytics, such as Predictive Modeling and Collaborative Optimization, among other techniques to drive supply chain improvements.  In addition, we will explore the best practices and lessons learned in executing these complex, but rewarding, techniques.