Three enlightening speakers and a lively discussion were the feature points of the first Supply Chain Management SIG at Jervis B. Webb in Hamilton. We had Kevin Maynard from the Supply Chain Sector Council who talked about what supply chain management is and the labour market issues in it.  Corey Turnbull from Trillium HC was the second speaker and he focused on the shifts in the role of supply chain and how important lean is to that change.  Our final speaker was Marcus Vandenburg, former Quality Manager at Raymond Industrial who talked about measuring and tracking the performance of suppliers and talks about how he helped the suppliers.

The first speaker was Kevin Maynard, Executive Director of the Supply Chain Sector Council.   

One of the primary areas of focus of sector councils relates to labour market issues. We concentrate our efforts on:

• Preparing labour market information on particular sectors of the economy to assess what the skills shortages are and where they are likely to occur
• Preparing information for young people (and those looking to change careers) on career possibilities and the education/training required
• Developing standards and certification for new entrants and for those in the workforce, to advance their skills development and facilitate their labour mobility

Kevin suggested 'The World is Flat' by Thomas Friesen as an excellent book for those who want to learn more about supply chain management.

Kevin also provided this chart which provides an excellent view of what supply chain includes.

What does supply chain include?

Our second speaker was Corey Turnbull, Supply Chain Supervisor at Trillium HC. Corey has also worked as a production Supervisor so has seen 2 very different sides of manufacturing.   He started by talking about some of the challenges in 2010 with Supply Chain including:

• Regulations are getting tougher
•  Vendors are offshore
• •  Long lead times
  •  Unresponsive vendors
  •  Time difference
  •  Language barriers
  •  Quality concerns ( cGMP, USP regs )
  •  Vendor Audit concerns
•  Capacity at vendors is almost non existent
  •  Most are weary to bring more back online without a period of sustained growth
  •  Mergers by large companies have created gigantic mega-saurs…who feed on their own egos
•  Low Cost option
•  Cost Reductions expected
•  No one wants to carry inventory, but to be responsive…someone has to

For many companies the whole thought of how to manage or change how you manage your Supply Chain is very overwhelming.  Corey offers the following suggestions for companies looking at starting their supply chain management system:

• Lean theories….remembering lean is a theory…not a template that fits exactly the same
•  Use experience, Education and ability to see the entire picture
•  Simple, Simpler and Simplest
  •  Reduce, Redesign and Repeat
• Regulations are getting tougher - you can't change these and have to learn to work within these

Our final speaker was Marcus Vandenburg, former Quality Manager for Raymond Industrial.  Marcus talked about how does Raymond Brantford manage their supply chain? Their first step was to Measure and Set Targets - they needed to know where they were today. They then used the targets help them understand where they wanted to go.  The targets were 50% improvements each year for a 90% improvement in 3 years.

So what does Raymond Brantford measure?     

1. Delivery - Do they deliver on time?  On time meaning no earlier than 3 days before dock date and 0 days after dock date.
2. Quality - How many defect incidents has a particular supplier had in a given week, month and year.
3. Cost - Cost is always measured when new parts are quoted.  The supplier is also measured on the number of cost saving suggestions and price reductions tendered throughout the year.

Overall I think they created some great thought provoking ideas about the world of Supply Chain.  They didn't provide all the answer but provided good first steps and some great suggestions for the future of Supply Chain SIGs in Hamilton/St. Catharines/Niagara area.  Some suggestions for future events included talking about thh supply chain from the point of view of the customer.  Several individuals suggested getting some concrete examples of how they have improved their Supply Chain and also on what metrix they used to measure success in this area.  Watch for future events that will cover these areas!

Members can access the full presentation from Kevin, Corey and Marcus by clicking on their names in this sentence.

Thanks to Jervis B. Webb for hosting this great event!

For more information on the Hamilton/St. Catharines/Niagara SIG please contact Laura Gibson at 226-388-3894 or by e-mail at lgibson@emccanada.org