Understanding and strengthening the key role of effective supply chain management is critical to an organization’s overall performance. Patricia E. Moody, a management consultant and writer based in Boston (The Kaizen Blitz, Breakthrough Partnering, The Big Squeeze, Powered by Honda, The Purchasing Machine, The Technology Machine, The Perfect Engine, etc.), shares her recommendations for key supply chain management resources.
Readers can use tools from the 1951 book, Facts from Figures, by M.J. Moroney (Penguin Books) to identify which problems need attention — to plot data, look for patterns, set control limits for quality defects, etc., suggested Moody. In turn, the data will help supply chain professionals and others to look for patterns in spend strategies as well as inventory and logistics problems. “At Rath & Strong, we were always hammered with Shewhart Award-winner and partner Dorian Shainin’s favorite adage, ‘Let the data lead you,’ and this book is one of those pre-personal computer basic books that’s a good point to start with investigative statistics,” said Moody. “I used it to help me develop a warehousing large order screen for Lightolier.”
She also recommended the book, Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance? by Louis V. Gerstner Jr. (Harper-Business, 2002. “It’s about the IBM turnaround, and the importance of supply chain strategies in enabling Gerstner to save the company,” Moody explained. “Gerstner was able to change the company from its role as a hardware provider to an integrated solutions provider using the $12 billion in funds freed up by CFO Jerry York and Gene Richter, the head of supply chain management. Richter, in whose memory the Richter Foundation Award was later established, led the way to bringing the company’s expense-to-revenue ratio into range — eliminating bloat and redundancies, cutting IT expenditures, etc.
Further, he developed a formula that was applied to each spend category — all spend categories for the corporation were centralized under Richter — that drove buyers to not just beat the competition’s purchase cost, but to become the kind of commodity experts who could anticipate and beat the market.
Powered by Honda, Developing Excellence in the Global Enterprise, by Dave Nelson, Moody, and Rick Mayo (a Honda supplier development engineer) (John Wiley and Sons, 1998), is another Moody selection. Look for descriptions of how Honda supplier engineers worked with purchasing and manufacturing to do the kind of work (such as talking with an assembler and installing a table to improve the ergonomics of her day-to-day tasks) needed to take waste and cost out of operations.
Also on her list of “top picks:” The Big Squeeze: Ten Ways to Cut Your Spend Ten Percent Right Now! (by Patricia E. Moody, Oaklea Press, Richmond, VA, 2005). Readers will find supply chain improvement suggestions from dozens of sources. For example, a story from Professor Diana Twede at Michigan State University tells about an innovative packaging engineering project, pallet- less printer shipping, that saved Hewlett-Packard millions. She also likes resources in logistics, distribution, warehousing (such as The Warehousing Education and Research Council, or WERC, at www.werc.org), and packaging (The Institute of Packaging Professionals or IoPP at www.iopp.org), in addition to groups such as the Container Recycling Institute (www.containerrecycling. org) and the Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals (CSCMP at www.cscmp.org).
For assessments relative to best practices (purchasing, logistics, etc.), she recommended checking the APQC (American Productivity and Quality Center website www.apqc.org.). APQC benchmarks across multiple dimensions including business models and processes. She also noted the Institute for Supply Management (ISM) at www.ism.ws.
Lea A.P. Tonkin, Target editor-in-chief, lives in Woodstock, IL.
Basics
The Going Lean Fieldbook; A Practical Guide to Lean Transformation and Sustainable Success, by Stephen A. Ruffa, AMACOM, New York, 2011. The author, a recipient of the Shingo Prize for Excellence in Manufacturing Research, reinforces the core principles, tools, and practices of “lean dynamics” — to help leaders and managers learn how to nurture a lean environment that is understood and supported by employees.
Process Design: Making It Work; A Practical Guide to What to Do When and How for Facilitators, Consultants, Managers, and Coaches, by Dorothy Strachan and Paul Tomlinson, Jossey-Bass, A Wiley Company, San Francisco, 2008. As the authors note on p. 242, “ … building designs and questions collaboratively, based on the best evidence available, contains the possibility of evidence-based answers that have the potential to change how things are done for the betterment of people’s lives.”
Sigma Financial Tracking and Reporting; Measuring Project Performance and P&L Impact by Michael Bremer, Brian McKibben, and Thomas McCarty, McGraw-Hill, New York, 2006. Case studies, examples, and benchmarking techniques to enable readers’ development of infrastructure for project identification, project scoping, and financial reporting. In turn, readers will learn how to document the net worth of improvement projects, develop realistic metrics, and show a clear line of sight from project savings to financial accounts.
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Named a Manufacturing Hero by Fortune magazine for her work during the Tylenol crisis, Patricia E. Moody is credited with saving Johnson & Johnson. She sits on various corporate and government boards, received an honorary doctorate, holds an MBA, and has authored 13 books and features on manufacturing and supply management. Her clients include BP, Waste Management, Respironics, Motorola, Cisco, Flextronics, and Tyco. A frequent keynoter who also works with publishers to bring books to fruition, she is Target’s former editor and is on the advisory board of MIT’s Sloan Management Review. She can be reached at tricia@patriciaemoody.com. |
