Hi, my name is Jim Tompkins. I’m the President and CEO of Tompkins Associates and Tompkins International.
This is the third part of a series on the Benchmarking and Best Practices consortium, and I am pleased to welcome back Bruce Tompkins, the executive director of the Supply Chain Consortium.
In our first part of this series, we discuss the organization of the consortium, and in the second part we discuss the services and the activities of the consortium. In the third installment, we will discuss the Leadership Forum.
Bruce, let’s begin by having you tell us more about the Leadership Forum.
Bruce:
Good question, Jim. The forum is our annual conference for consortium members, and it’s a members-only event. So that really makes it kind of special, and I’ll talk more about that in a minute. We invite all the members of the consortium to attend the Leadership Forum, and really the idea is for them to share their insight, share their knowledge and share what they are doing, so it makes it a great activity for peer networking.
Also we have some very noted keynote speakers and some other speakers that bring a lot of special knowledge and humor to the event. We need to have fun while we’re also learning, so we make that an important part of what we do. And these are people who are really practitioners of supply chain, and they bring a unique viewpoint that helps people learn a lot. When people walk away from the forum, they know they have been somewhere where they have picked up knowledge that they will be able to apply when they get back to the office.
Jim:
How is this event unique for supply chain professionals?
Bruce:
First of all, the format is unique. It’s really set up primarily as a large discussion type of orientation. So 80 percent of the time people are in sessions, usually it’s more like 15-20 people, where they are talking about specific topics that they have expressed interest in. And we have multiple tracks going on at the same time so people get to select what kind of topic they want to discuss. But it’s mostly small groups discussions. It’s small enough where people do get to talk to each other. During the breaks, at lunch, dinner, people really do get to sit down and talk to the other members, and understand what’s going on with them, and even go to the forum with the intention of speaking with specific people at specific companies. The idea that’s supply chain person talking to supply chain person is also really a positive. The other thing though is that it is big enough so we have a good cross-section of companies participating, a good cross-section of industries, and people from all different kinds of different backgrounds.
The other thing I’ll say about it is that it’s really a members-only event. So there’s none of the usual conference salesmenship that’s going on, there’s no one there to do any selling, there’s just shippers and people who have supply chain. This is a leadership event, so the level of people that are attending is very high and the knowledge base that we have in the break-out sessions and from the participants is very, very good.
Jim:
Bruce, what kind of topics are covered at the forum?
Bruce:
The kinds of topics that we cover really varies near the year. We don’t have any set sort of format set for that. What we really try hard to do is capture the topics that are of interest to people at that given point in time. We really wait to closer to when the Leadership Forum is going to be held, and then we figure out what are the topics that are hot and important to people at that point in time. This year we talked a lot about recovery from the recession, and developing a strategic plan based on when different industries and different companies would be coming out of the recession and in a position to move their supply chains forward. We covered sustainability kinds of issues. We covered government and regulatory issues that are impacting people.
We use the data that we collect from our main database and also a lot of special surveys that we do in the months leading up to the forum to help us with materials and help get conversations started. Then we let the group go from there and talk about it. We did something new in 2009, we had a real-time survey.
One of the opening sessions was to gather input from the members on what topics were of interest to them, and then we defined a survey right there while they were in the forum. Then we presented the results back to them in one of the last sessions that we had. Really, real-time survey on what was hot and what was interesting to them in the supply chain as they came to our forum. Next year, I’m not sure what we’ll be talking about, but it’ll be whatever’s hot in the supply chain.
Jim:
When and where is the forum in 2010?
Bruce:
We already have selected a date, and that is August 31 – September 1. So we know when we will be having it. In terms of where, that’s still being researched. We usually make that decision 11 or 10 months in advance of the event because we want to find a place that is going to be easy to travel to, an interesting location, where we can get a great conference facility and also we want to minimize the cost to our members. We have a couple of front-runners at the moment for the 2010 event. We may return to Chicago again. Memphis has been mentioned by our consortium members, as has Dallas. So we’re going to be focusing on the center of the U.S. and we’ll see which of those particular cities wins. But the bottom line is that we’ll have it in a location that really provides the right kind of atmosphere for the event that we have.
Jim:
Bruce, lastly, how can people learn more about attending the 2010 forum?
Bruce:
We have a web site: www.supplychainconsortium.com and in fact anybody can go to this web site and get a lot of information about who we are and what we do, and how we do it. There’s a menu item on that web site that’s labeled Leadership Forum. If you click on that, the first that you’ll see is information about the 2010 event. It’s kind of a high-level bunch of information at this point. There’s also a lot of information about the 2009 event, so you can find out what the agenda was and how that all worked out. That’ll give you a pretty good idea of what the 2010 event will look like. The Leadership Forum is really, really a great experience for the supply chain professionals that attend. I think that all the members go back to their respective companies having learned a lot and have some real action items that they can deploy in their company. It’s also a real source of continuous learning. I have never been to a Leadership Forum yet that I didn’t walk away with a lot of new things learned that I’m not sure I would have experienced any other way. I encourage all of you to think about joining the consortium and attending our Leadership Forum event next August 31 – September 1, 2010.
Jim:
Thanks, Bruce, for being with us today and discussing the Leadership Forum. I look forward to you joining us in two weeks when we talk about the process of joining the consortium. Until then, all the best.
