Company Announcement - Supply chain disruptions can have an enormous impact on company performance. One source estimates that firms experiencing these problems on average see an 11% reduction in shareholder value. Another estimates they incur around a 40% reduction in stock price. With supply chain complexity rising fast over the past 30 years, the best organisations can do right now is to prepare themselves for such unforeseen problems. But how?

Be Prepared
As the old scout motto says: “A scout must prepare himself by previously thinking out and practicing how to act on any accident or emergency so that he is never taken by surprise.”

“This sums it up pretty well,” says Paul Pittman (Ph.D., CFPIM, CSCP, Jonah), Professor of Operations Management at Indiana University Southeast. “The companies that seem to handle unexpected events relatively well aren’t merely lucky. In truth, these organisations’ leaders are just more mindful of their environments and decisions.” Pittman and his colleague, Brian Atwater, will share their insights on mindful leadership during their workshop entitled Mindfulness to Becoming an Effective Supply Chain Manager at the SAPICS 2015 conference, taking place from 31 May - 2 June at Sun City. The concept of being mindful deals with simply being more aware of your surroundings, or using what you do know to be more prepared to deal with what you don’t know.

While the definition of mindfulness is quite simple, practicing mindfulness is not. During the presentation at SAPICS 2015, Pittman and Atwater will share several tools designed to help managers see far deeper than normal. “Mindless thinking says ‘problems just happen’ and ‘things are never as they appear’,” he says. “By contrast, mindful managers believe that most problems can be predicted and that is why they look deeper for signs of underlying issues.”

During the session, participants will discuss why people spend so much time engaged in mindless activities, share examples of routine scenarios to contrast mindful versus mindless decisions. They will also discuss specific techniques to increase managers’ mindfulness while working in the field of operations and supply chain management.

“We’ll teach you how to see patterns in events and identify underlying systemic structures within an organisation that can be the key to preventing potential disaster,” he says. According to Pittman, this kind of thinking empowers managers to shift from a ‘victim’ complex that seeks to apportion blame, to a solution orientation that sees potential problems as challenges that can be addressed.

Seek answers where there seem to be no questions

• What can go wrong?
• What is the likelihood of it happening?
• What is the impact if it does happen?

“By seeking the answers to these three basic questions concerning everything from a regular oil spill that you notice on the factory floor to the likelihood of a supplier’s failure to perform, it’s possible to mitigate most risks facing supply chains today,” he says.

To help managers do this, during their presentation they will introduce and expand on tools that track cause and effect, as well as analyse the likelihood of failure and map supply chain vulnerabilities, amongst other tools for improving mindfulness.

“By applying these techniques, it may just be that few things will catch you by surprise ever again,” concludes Pittman. Now that’s something to think about.