Sixteen session tracks, dozens of exhibitors, endless possibilities for networking—the Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals’ annual conference can be information overload for the veterans and newcomers alike.
And CSCMP understands that, which is why for this year’s conference, to be held Sept. 27-30 in San Diego, the organization built five so-called cornerstones to help attendees find the sessions and networking opportunities most vital for their business.
It’s a subtle change, but one CSCMP President and Chief Executive Officer Rick Blasgen believes will make a big difference.
“This is a conference by members and for members,” he said. “There are so many people willing to share things about their companies, so we’ve aggregated things into cornerstones.”
The cornerstones are:
- Economic forecasts, benchmarks, and surveys.
- Leadership, talent and career.
- Manufacturing, planning, and sourcing.
- Supply chain solutions and practice.
- Transportation, distribution, and warehousing.
The cornerstones show just how deep and wide content at the annual conference has gotten—this is true supply chain from sourcing to final delivery.
“Supply chain management has come into its own in terms of its impact on business,” Blasgen said. “It’s not just about inventory management or sourcing or visibility. We don’t have that single focus [for the conference] anymore. It’s about incorporating supply chain into the rest of the business. It’s a true supply chain conference, from global sourcing and procurement to transportation, but also covering planning and leadership, and acquiring and maintaining talent. It’s about how to run the business.”
Blasgen said the keynote speakers this year—Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz and Dave Clark, senior vice president of worldwide operations and customer service at Amazon Fulfillment—are emblematic of the truly global nature of supply chain.
Some of the conference’s associated humanitarian events include drives to bring military veterans into the industry (an initiative near and dear to Schultz) and a two-hour session on Sunday where attendees can help reach a goal of preparing 45,000 packaged meals to send to impoverished nations. The event, held in conjunction with Stop Hunger Now, is an example, Blasgen said, of a “humanitarian approach to what a supply chain can do.”
“Supply chain is globally relevant,” he said. “We as leaders need to think about the economies and countries we connect to through our supply chains, and this should be top of mind. It’s not just about arranging transportation legs.”
The cornerstone set of tracks focused around leadership and talent is a hallmark of CSCMP, an organization whose purpose is to attract, educate, and connect people to supply chains. Blasgen said talent has been a recurrent theme among members.
“It’s a personal pet peeve, that our educational system doesn’t stress supply chain as a career earlier in the process,” he said. “Most kids stumble across it in college.”
Part of the changing talent landscape is that supply chain as a career is more transferrable now than it used to be.
“Talent is more portable between industries,” Blasgen said. “Years ago, if I had a position at a CPG (consumer packaged goods) company, I might have stayed in CPG. But now that expertise is more transferrable.”
That emphasis on talent comes as supply chain has generally taken greater importance within most organizations. The proliferation of chief supply chain officers, as opposed to transportation and logistics reporting to a more generic operations executive, means that companies see that supply chain is an integral part of what they do.
Blasgen, with a background in food supply chains, said his former industry and the consumer packaged goods industry have understood the importance of supply chain for awhile, either due to tighter margins or the innate need to control the supply chain around perishable goods. Other verticals—he mentioned health care—are just beginning to see supply chain as an area in which they can become more efficient and reduce costs.
“Organizational alignment is key,” he said, emphasizing how sourcing and procurement is now being handled in a more cohesive way with other supply chain functions.
Blasgen pointed to the role that software providers and third party logistics services companies have played in this development.
“We’ve just survived the recession and you have a lot of exhausted people,” he said. “But now there’s money flowing in toward innovation, so it’s a good time to hear from the technology providers.”
The supply chain solutions and practice cornerstone includes 15 sessions led by solutions and service providers, though they are also represented in other tracks, such as transportation and warehousing.
The keynotes, in many ways, set the tone for the rest of the event, and Blasgen said having Amazon’s Clark speak will focus people on the disruptiveness they’ve created in the supply chain industry. Clark has been with Amazon for 16 years and will discuss how the online retailer teamed up with the U.S. Postal Service for Sunday deliveries and is partnering with hundreds of mom-and-pop shops in India to fulfill orders for its customers.
On Monday, Sept. 28, Starbucks is sponsoring a veteran recruitment day, where employers can meet face-to-face with military service members to speak about career opportunities. The veteran recruitment initiative provides a counterpoint to CSCMP’s traditional student recruitment day, which will be held the next day.
Other notable sessions:
- Brad Jacobs, CEO of fast-growing XPO Logistics, will host a town hall forum.
- Descartes Systems Executive Vice President Chris Jones will discuss how supply chains are becoming oriented around the customer.
- A cross-section of industry panelists will discuss whether the generational divide is something leaders need to understand and manage.
- Yossi Sheffi, MIT supply chain professor, will explain how successful companies engineer resiliency into their supply chains.
Blasgen said one of the imperatives for each track chair this year was to build at least one session per track that didn’t use PowerPoint. The goal was to provide a more engaging environment where attendees can learn directly from their peers.
“Our conferences are known for people really being willing to share,” he said. “Let’s face it—everyone knows what everyone else is doing. It’s about execution.”
The conference has grown so much, from a subject matter and global standpoint, that Blasgen joked about just how far that influence may eventually reach.
“We’ve come a long way from physical distribution (at its inception in 1963, the organization was known as the National Council of Physical Distribution Management),” he said. “If we find life on Mars, we’d be the Intergalactic Supply Chain Council.”
This article was published in the September 2015 issue of American Shipper.