The pandemic exposed some hard truths about the state of supply chain planning. Significant gaps in employee competencies, a shortage of empowered senior leaders, and insufficient organizational support severely constrained many companies’ responses to the worldwide crisis. Leading companies have taken those lessons to heart and are now making supply chain planning a strategic priority.
Consider the experience of one multinational IT infrastructure company. The supply chain had established disciplines within its traditional functions. But the planning competencies needed to coordinate across functions and manage technology changes were severely lacking. As a senior supply chain manager related: “The company faced 20x our normal level of disruption during the pandemic. The volume of information needed to manage that much disruption was intense. So was the amount of cross-functional coordination.” Managers also struggled to communicate the larger, strategic impact of planning to senior leadership. “At the end of the day, you can only sell what you can get,” the manager said. “The big lesson for us coming out of the pandemic was that planning is much more than scheduling.”
Supply chain planning refers to a set of iterative, interconnected decisions aimed at continuously aligning company capacity, inventory, and other assets to maximize profits. It integrates a range of decisions across different time horizons: from longer-term optimization of global supply networks to near-term scheduling of deliveries. Figure 1 provides an overview of the different processes involved in supply chain planning.
FIGURE 1: Planning framework
Senior executives are looking to planners to lead key initiatives from innovation and digitization to agility and risk management. Our team at the University of Tennessee–Knoxville’s Advanced Supply Chain Collaborative (ASCC) has been working to define the planning talent and leadership development needed to meet these new expectations. (For additional information about the ASCC, see the sidebar below.)
Next-generation planning talent
Our findings suggest planning competencies need to evolve beyond traditional technical skills to include a broad array of social and personal strengths. Our team identified 11 planning competencies (see Figure 2) that reflect this evolution:
FIGURE 2: The 11 core competencies of supply chain planning
- Ambiguity tolerance. The ability to act effectively in situations where next steps are undefined, there are multiple interpretations, or signals are weak or mixed.
- Self-awareness. The ability to see oneself and one’s work within larger professional and personal contexts.
- Change leadership. The ability to help others succeed in new and changing contexts.
- Compelling communication. The ability to present ideas in a manner that is clear, concise, data-driven, and oriented toward concrete action.
- Conflict management. The ability to manage differences in ways that satisfy the needs of stakeholders while promoting learning and ethical action.
- Cultural leadership. The ability to support and establish organizational cultures—and help those cultures evolve over time.
- Data analytics. The ability to analyze data to generate insights that drive action.
- Empathy. The ability to recognize another’s experiences and act appropriately in a helpful manner.
- Negotiation skills. The ability to uncover mutually beneficial outcomes through a prosocial concern for stakeholders.
- Team leadership. The ability to provide purpose, accountability, and resources to a team.
- Technological fluency. The ability to drive new opportunities through a detailed understanding of current and emerging technologies.
Competencies drive transformation
These are not the typical knowledge, skills, and attitudes advertised for supply chain planning positions. But they are critical for success in today’s operating environment. Take ambiguity tolerance. Planners nowadays are often required to make decisions with partial information and take contingent actions in rapidly shifting environments. Moreover, planners must be comfortable engaging with different viewpoints and challenging their own perceptions.
Other competencies will be crucial for meeting the challenges of digitization. For example, leaders clearly express a desire for more digitized, automated planning processes, ranking their disparate data silos and a lack of visibility into material flows as top concerns. But research indicates that in order to realize the full value of advanced technologies, companies must invest in the capabilities of their people. To drive digital transformation, planning leaders must develop teams with the technological fluency to test new solutions and assess their potential value.
Beyond technological fluency, planners will also need to be comfortable leading change. A true digital capability means routinely identifying, assessing, and adopting technologies in ways that push the productivity frontier and serve as a basis for competitive advantage. Planners will need to support others as new technologies transform traditional roles and responsibilities. The bottom line is that managing social and psychological factors associated with change will be as important as the technical implementation. Planners need to be ready for this new aspect of their work.
Focus on experience
Competencies emerge through experiences. By applying knowledge and skills through experiences, planners build the “muscle memory” that is at the core of any competency. As leaders start to define talent development programs, they need to expose planners to high-impact, hands-on learning, and then support those experiences with educational opportunities, processes, metrics, and incentives.
Supporting experiences that build planning competencies can be a challenge. First, no single experience will generate a desired competency. Instead, companies need to provide a range of experiences that support different elements of the planning competencies they hope to build. This takes thinking creatively about actions that can drive social and personal strengths. Our research identified five broad areas (see Figure 3) for companies to consider in supporting planning competencies:
FIGURE 3: Five broad action areas to support planning competency development
- Enhancing storytelling and communication. Integrating information about the operating environment into a coherent narrative that motivates action is central to planning.
- Infusing change management and influence strategies. Inspiring and leading change is critical for planners tasked with system transformation.
- Linking diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) to supply chain success. A robust DEI program has enormous potential to benefit the entire planning organization by helping to develop competencies not just among underrepresented groups but also for those not directly impacted by DEI recruitment and retention efforts.
- Mentoring, coaching, and leadership. New hires and top talent alike do significantly better with an active sponsor, mentor, or coach.
- Managing through ambiguity. Sustaining performance in planning requires a workforce that can adapt to changes in the marketplace and rapid technological advancements.
These broad-based organizational action areas are mutually supporting, helping to develop different dimensions across several competencies. For instance, linking diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) to supply chain success entails developing talent from underrepresented groups and tapping their knowledge and experiences as resources for learning how to improve core work. Our research suggests that a robust DEI program has the potential to significantly support development in nine of the 11 core competencies identified above: ambiguity tolerance, self-awareness, change leadership, compelling communication, conflict management, cultural leadership, empathy, negotiation skills, and team leadership.
The point is that, as companies pursue their strategic objectives, they must think broadly about the individual-level competencies planners will need. Implementing specific training programs to achieve particular capabilities will likely fall short. Rather, companies should focus on organizational action areas that broadly support the organization’s talent development needs. (Suggestions for specific educational opportunities, processes, metrics, and incentives for each of the five action areas can be found in the white paper, “Developing the Next-Generation of Supply Chain Planning Talent and Leadership” on ASCC’s website.)
Now is the time
Supply chain planners need a new set of competencies to drive organizational success. Planners must be comfortable managing teams, leading change, and adapting to new technologies. Other capabilities may also be needed. For example, extensions of our research suggest financial literacy and business acumen may be critical competencies for planners to develop.
As leaders approach developing the next generation of planning talent, they should ask themselves a number of questions: Does my company have a process for identifying the competencies needed to achieve planning excellence? What experiences is my company providing planners to build their competencies? What educational opportunities, processes, metrics, and incentives does my company have in place to develop planning competencies? The time to start developing the next generation of planning talent is now.
About this research
This research was conducted as part of the Advanced Supply Chain Collaborative (ASCC) at the University of Tennessee–Knoxville (UT). The ASCC works as a think tank, engaging industry experts and UT faculty on leading topics in supply chain management. Teams of three to four individuals from two or more companies, led by a UT faculty member, work together on a topic of shared interest. Projects provide significant peer-to-peer learning in an open and supportive environment. The goal is to provide today’s leaders with new insights for navigating a rapidly changing operating environment.
This research was conducted using an interactive research design. Weekly conversations were conducted with a core group of corporate partners with significant supply chain planning expertise. The team explored the project’s research questions through in-depth, open-ended conversations. Discussions drew on participants’ practical experiences with talent and leadership development challenges and members’ considerable expertise. Subject matter experts were brought into the discussion to drive deeper investigations of topics as they emerged. Conversation notes were captured, and central themes and insights were distilled and presented to the group each week. Ideas that emerged were validated against the research literature; new ideas were defined and dimensionalized.
Findings from this research are published in “Developing the Next Generation of Supply Chain Planning Talent and Leadership,” a white paper downloadable for free from the University of Tennessee–Knoxville’s Global Supply Chain Institute.
