If you’ve ever been involved in attempts to improve supply chains and things haven’t gone to plan, you’ve probably come across one or more of the people barriers that get in the way of change in supply chains.

After 15 years of working with people in supply chains, we believe that there are three barriers to improvement:

1 - Your people don’t have the right competences.
2 - Your people don’t/can’t work together.
3 - The performance environment doesn’t allow your people to change.

If we understand these people barriers then we can take this into account when we are planning and managing supply chain improvements and increase our chances of success. So what do these barriers mean? Let’s look at them in a bit more detail.

Supply Chain Competences

The key question is ‘What do we want our people to be able to do?’ Clearly, this is about defining the competences that your people need and then working out where the gaps are. This is the most obvious barrier and the one that we tend to focus on first.

But before focusing on your people, shouldn’t you work out what you want the organisation to be able to do?

It is a mistake to look at individuals first. Remember that what you are trying to do is to support the goals of your organisation. So we should start with the question ‘what do we want the organisation to be able to do?’ For example, you might want to reduce forecast error, improve product availability or reduce lead times. Once you have defined what the organisation needs to do, you can work out what competences your people will need.

Working together

What is it that prevents your supply chain people from working together? Why is this so difficult?

To answer this question we need to remember that supply chains cut across functional barriers in the organisation. As we might expect, people in their functions have ways of doing things that they’re used to and there’s a natural reluctance to change.

But there’s another factor - a misconception in fact- that prevents people from working across functions. The problem is that people think that if they concentrate on making their functions perform well then the whole supply chain will perform well.

But supply chains don’t work like that. Remember the time that your buyer bought in bulk to get the price down only to increase inventory costs? Or the time when product marketing decided to increase the product range which caused a bottleneck in production?

The reality is that supply chains work as systems - decisions made in one part of the chain can, and often do, affect the performance of the whole chain. This is a fundamental property of supply chains and even though it sounds like common sense, it seems that common sense is quite rare!

So to get your people to work together, you need to help them to understand how your supply chain works and how each of your functions contributes to supply chain performance.

The performance environment

The performance environment depends on your organisation, your processes and individual job factors. We can look at this by asking these questions:

• Are the organisation’s goals clear and have they been effectively communicated?
• Are functional goals linked to organisational goals, and is this performance measured and managed?
• Are individual job specifications clear?
• Are individuals measured and rewarded appropriately?
• Do individuals get feedback on their performance?
• Do individuals have the skills, knowledge and mental capacity to achieve their goals?

To allow individuals to perform (so that the organisation performs) you need to be able to answer ‘yes’ to all these questions. Any one of these issues can prevent your people from doing what you need them to do.

All together then…

So after 15 years, we think that we have finally worked it out. If you want to ensure that your people play their part in improving the performance of your supply chain, you have to dismantle the people barriers:

Define what you need your people to be able to do and ensure they have the right supply chain competences.

Ensure that your people have the right mindset so that they will want to work with people in other functions.

Make sure that the performance environment encourages your people to change their behaviour in the appropriate way.

And if you want to know how to do this in practise, come and talk to us!