Hi, my name is Jim Tompkins. I'm the President and CEO of Tompkins Associates and Tompkins International.
Today, I have with me Bruce Tompkins to present the fifth and final portion of our supply chain benchmarking and best practices consortium series.
In the first part of this series, Bruce discussed with me the organization of the consortium; in the second part the services and activities; in the third we discussed the Leadership Forum, and in the fourth, the process of joining the consortium.
Today we discuss the fifth and final portion of this series, lessons from the leaders.
Bruce, let's begin discussing lessons from leaders, by discussing how do leading companies use the consortium?
Bruce:
It really is very important to look at lessons from the people who use the consortium and Tompkins Associates the best. There are some best practices with respect to using the consortium. It is a key to why many companies join the consortium and in fact it's been a philosophy of the consortium to understand that different companies are in different places with their supply chain practices at different points in time.
Some people are the leaders in certain areas, and so they should take the front and we should learn from them. Some people are not the leaders, and they should be willing to learn from what others are doing.
There are clearly some best practices with respect to benchmarking and best practices. Some of the leaders in our consortium in terms of using the process fully utilize the tools that we have. So, they don't just use one aspect of the consortium or one process in the consortium, they use it all. They use the database that we have and the tools that are part of that for self-analysis.
They understand the practices and attempt to get the most out of the practices that people put the information into our database on. They participate in our surveys so that they get that kind of information and get that feedback on those particular survey questions. They're active in the research that we do.
Also they do a lot of networking with each other, sometimes through the consortium, sometimes outside of the consortium. Other ways they do that obviously is with the Leadership Forum. So those are the companies that we know for sure are getting the most out of this process, because they are using the most of the tools that we have available.
Also, the other thing that they do to supplement the benchmarking and best practices process is networking with Tompkins Associates and using Tompkins' subject matter experts to help understand their issues and help them identify solutions that they should be pursuing.
So it's really a combination of using the system that's set up for the consortium member and using Tompkins Associates' capabilities and skill sets to help them improve.
Jim:
Bruce, how do companies fully use the networking the consortium provides?
Bruce:
In terms of networking that the consortium provides, it really has evolved and changed and improved over the years as technology has improved, so we feel really good about the things that companies can use to network with each other today. Obviously there's things like LinkedIn and Xing and other social networking groups.
We have a Supply Chain Consortium group for those, so companies can network through those. As of now there's well over 300 contacts in our LinkedIn group(click here to join the LinkedIn group) and our Xing group is growing pretty rapidly. That's a good way for people to interact with each other. I already mentioned the Leadership Forum. That's the best way I know of for face-to-face interaction so people can do that networking with their peers.
We also establish formal and informal networking opportunities for companies within the consortium, so if a consortium company wants to talk to with a company, or a group of companies, we will help arrange those discussions, and have an agenda and help facilitiate it if they want. Those kinds of formal networking activities are good.
Or, we'll just provide information for one company to reach out to another. All of these are great networking opportunities and also, if there's something that people are not getting through the consortium, there's always a way to interface with a Tompkins person who may be a subject matter area and we'll set up discussions with that person, as well as with other companies to talk about issues.
So networking is a very important part of the consortium, and what people get out of participating.
Jim:
Probably the most common question I get about the consortium is: How do they get help with a specific supply chain issue they are facing?
Bruce:
If a company has an issue on a specific supply chain topic, there's lots of ways to get help on that. First of all there's using the database, so if a company is not getting an answer through the database, and the survey questions and processes that it has, then call us, interact with us, and let us help you with that issue.
If our benchmarking and best practices team, which has a pretty diverse background is not able to help, then we'll find someone who can, either through other consortium companies who happen to know something about an issue and could help answer that question, or through a subject matter expert through Tompkins or some other company.
This is a key aspect of the consortium and one I don't think people take enough advantage of. It's kind of like the men-asking-for-directions kind of thing, where men don't tend to want to ask for directions; in this case we see a lot of supply chain executives and leaders who don't want to ask for assistance in certain areas, but to be honest that is really a good way to learn more from others and to benefit from the consortium and the power of having a group of 500-plus members that you're interacting with.
I think this was a great set of questions to end our podcast with. These are important issues and it's very important to talk away lessons learned from people who are using the consortium the best.
There are best practices that leaders out there, who are employing them in different areas of the supply chain, and we should use those to get the most benefit. I think the people within in the consortium who are getting the most out of our membership are the ones who use everything that's available to them to get the answers.
I look forward to our new series starting in 2 weeks: We're going to focus on the green supply chain. Green as in sustainability, as in environmentally-friendly and as in green financially - being financially responsible while we take care of our environment and the sustainability of our resources.
Look forward to speaking to you real soon. Have a good one.
