Supply chain is finally cool
Whether you called it distribution, or warehousing, or logistics or supply chain, the fact is until very recently supply chain was boring and nerdy.
By Robert C. Kennedy
Many years ago, when my oldest daughter was just 4 years old (she is now 36), I returned from a business trip and was on the bedtime shift. I had a can of Pepsi with me as we ventured up to her room to read books. As we finished the last of them, she looked up and asked, “Daddy, what do you do for work?”
How do you explain what a warehouse management system does to a four-year-old? How do you explain supply chain? I tried. I talked about how when you go to the store the things you want to buy are brought in on a truck from a big warehouse. I explained that we help the warehouse by keeping track of all the boxes. Then I pointed to the UPC code on my can of Pepsi and explained a machine can shine a light on these lines and it will tell them what it is. She seemed satisfied with that as the lights were turned out.
Weeks later, at her fifth birthday party, she had some of the neighborhood girls over for a tea party. While sitting at the dining room table she picked up her can of ginger ale, pointed to the UPC code and said, “My daddy makes these.”
That’s what she took from our conversation about my work from weeks prior: I make bar codes. I still claimed a partial victory.
That story brings to mind the fact that throughout the course of my career it really wasn’t much different with adults. Most wouldn’t ask me what I did because they kind of knew they wouldn’t get it or wouldn’t end up caring. And on those occasions when I was asked, it didn’t take long for eyes to glaze over. Whether you called it distribution, or warehousing, or logistics or supply chain, the fact is until very recently supply chain was boring and nerdy.
Then came Amazon and, astonishingly, people came to realize that they could order almost anything online and it would arrive in a day or two. Amazon brings toilet paper and cleaning supplies to our house! The term supply chain entered the common lexicon as stories about Amazon and Jeff Bezos proliferated in the media. Those stories were coupled with others about retail stores closing, China’s economy and so forth.
Then the pandemic hit. People realized firsthand that supply chains were part of our infrastructure. As is true of any infrastructure, no one really thinks about it until there is a problem, like when the air conditioning won’t work in July, or in the case of supply chain, when you can’t get baby formula or peanut butter. Throughout the pandemic, it seemed that people recalled that I was a supply chain guy and they expected that I knew everything that was going on and wanted to know what WE supply chain guys were doing to fix it. (I told them to read the newspapers because that’s where I was getting my information). The general population certainly learned more about the driver shortages and port capacity issues in that era of the pandemic than ever before. Still, I have people asking me what happened and why.
Supply chain is now cool. And with it, the thousands of people involved in every facet of supply chain are also cool. Finally. We don’t just get to sit at the cool table in the cafeteria, we have our own cool table. Maybe we will even get our own TV series like all those lawyers and doctors and detectives.
Nah, probably not. We’ll just keep things running as always.
