The Future of Supply Management

This is an excerpt of the original article. It was written for the January-February 2017 edition of Supply Chain Management Review. The full article is available to current subscribers.

January-February 2017

Transformation is a topic that comes up in almost every conversation I have with supply chain managers these days. Executives from companies as diverse as J&J Vision Care, the division of Johnson & Johnson that manufactures contact lenses, and Thrive Markets, a startup selling health and wellness products to its members, have talked about how they have had to remake their supply chains to meet new customer demands. Transformation is also the theme of this issue of SCMR.

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When it comes to predicting the future, we’ve all heard the sayings that no one has a crystal ball and that the only certainties are death and taxes. In supply chain management, we like to say that the only thing certain about a forecast is that it is always wrong. While researchers like those of us at CAPS Research may not be able to predict the future, we do know that it does not exist in isolation: It depends on the past and the present. This means that if we could compile the collective projections of managers who are well informed about the past and present, we might be able to gain a glimpse into what is to come. Or, at the least, what the collective wisdom expects to occur.

That was the catalyst behind a project CAPS Research initiated in 2015. We asked more than 400 supply management professionals with titles such as vice president of supply management and senior procurement manager to look ahead five years into the future to 2020 and tell us what they think might happen. We distributed a lengthy questionnaire that typically took about 30 minutes to complete and we received back 113 responses. There were no incentives other than the opportunity to advance the body of knowledge in the profession.

In order to consider both the past and the present, the 2015 survey built upon the last “futures” survey CAPS Research administered in 2007. While some items were updated to reflect today’s business environment, most of the items remained the same. The preliminary framework (See Figure 1) recognizes that external forces of change drive corporate-level business strategies while supply missions are shaped by business strategies. Specific supply strategies are influenced by forces of change, business strategies and supply missions.

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