Welcome to Supply Change

Supply Change

Welcome to Supply Change, the inaugural Tradeshift podcast on the future of the supply chain.

The supply chain world is fast evolving with new technologies, approaches, and cultures, and the way your business strategizes supply chain operations is more important to your success than ever. That's why we’re starting a discussion to explore what really matters in today’s supply chain environment.

Looking back to look forward
Companies and entire industries have tried for years to address persistent problems along the supply chain. Traditionally, buyers and suppliers have a difficult time connecting with each other. Much of the dysfunction comes from company to company miscommunication, and from a procurement perspective, the industry has had a hard time catching up with innovation. So how do we fix this? Two new approaches are emerging:

The role of Design Thinking in the supply chain
Ron Volpe’s work centers around applying design thinking to supply chain innovation. A Harvard Business Review article featuring Ideo was instrumental in his work, leading to collaborating with Ideo to redesign supply chain processes and creating new ways to help streamline and break down supply chain silos.

Procurement’s human touch
Roy’s journey took him across the whole world of procurement, from Raytheon to Metlife and Mutual Insurance, to Netscape, MIT Media Labs, Goprocure and Tradeshift. And the most exciting part of all that experience in the procurement space is beyond the “bits and bytes,” it’s the human interaction of the supply chain. When you have a wide variety of customers, you have to be able to explain to them why they should use better, more innovative suppliers, even if that means change.

The Grieving Process of Change
And, shocker: people don’t like change. Even in the supply chain. Change can trigger the grieving process: you have to work through why something painful is happening to you and what it means for the way it’s going to affect your life. And that holds lessons for your work along the whole supply chain. You have to be more than just a technological solution, you have to be able to help your customers adapt and change and see why moving to something unfamiliar and different will benefit them in the long run, even if it doesn’t feel like it in the short term.

The World is Always Changing
Keeping things the same for the sake of keeping things the same has never worked, and doesn’t work in the supply chain. Students going in to school today are preparing themselves for jobs that haven’t even been invented yet, and change in the supply chain is no different. There’s going to be new relationships and new suppliers that you’ll have to find and build relationships with that don’t even exist yet in fields that you would have never expected. And that’s the exciting part of working in procurement today.

Next week, we’re going to be discussing why people “hate” procurement. Join us as Roy tries to change their mind.

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