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The supply chain leader of tomorrow: PMAC’s new accreditation program focuses on competencies
PMAC
With PMAC’s new Strategic Supply Chain Management Leadership Program rolling out across the country this year, we’re preparing the next generation of supply chain management leaders. Our renewed accreditation program leading to the C.P.P. designation—the highest achievement in our field of practice—will shape the competencies of strategic supply chain management (SCM) professionals in Canada and beyond.
The idea of competencies is significant. These skills define the abilities of an SCM professional, specifying what the person can do. For example, a competency expected from a supply chain professional is global sourcing, including the ability to evaluate strategic alternatives and communicate in a cross-cultural context.
Having the right competencies is essential to the current and future success of supply chain management professionals. To advance in their careers, SCM professionals must hone their skills and enhance the set of competencies they offer their employers. That’s why we’ve built our program around a competency map based on our profession’s body of knowledge.
Competencies of the future
New research undertaken by the Department of Marketing and Supply Chain Management at the Eli Broad Graduate School of Management (Michigan State University), supports PMAC findings that employers require business professionals who are well-versed in supply chain competencies at a strategic level. Employers throughout North America
report they cannot find supply chain professionals with the competencies to manage new strategic supply chains.
Today’s supply chains are critical, strategic and dynamic sources of competitive advantage. They need managers with the knowledge and skills to address future issues. The Michigan State study, co-led by Dr. Steven Melynk, program director for PMAC’s 2007 In-Residence Week, explores how we can ready managers for the roles they will take on within the next few years. The following five issues were identified as most important:
• Supply chain disruptions and risk;
• Leadership within the supply chain, including people
skills and the talent required of managers;
• Managing the timely delivery of goods and services;
• Managing product innovation by drawing on the capabilities
of the supply chain;
• Implementing appropriate technology to enable seamless
exchange of information within the supply chain.
The research also drilled down to the gaps between current
supply chain abilities and future requirements of supply
chain leaders. Highlights include:
• The need to develop ongoing relationships with a network
of collaborators: customers, suppliers and partners;
• An end-to-end focus on managing processes and operations
across corporate boundaries;
• The global perspective necessary to understand different
markets in different countries, and manage intercultural
relations;
• Shifting from management of the supply chain to supply
chain design and redesign;
• Focus on integration. Supply chain management is not
just about the core functions of procurement, logistics and
operations, but includes finance and accounting, marketing
and other functions;
• Customer-oriented supply chains are the new model—
driven by the customer and its shifting demands—not the
supply base.
Companies must acquire and grow supply chain leaders with this advanced understanding and highly-developed skill set if they want to compete effectively. Enter PMAC’s Strategic Supply Chain Management Leadership Program. The program, with its foundation of supply chain functional knowledge and “three pillars” of management, strategy and professionalism, develops these unique and distinctive
competencies. We’re training supply chain professionals to provide innovative strategic leadership to enterprises.
As the supply chain environment and best practices in the profession evolve, the program content will be continuously updated. This will ensure our program graduates continue to demonstrate the right competencies when confronting new and demanding business challenges. b2b
The above column, and the French translation on page 24, were
provided by the Purchasing Management Association of Canada.
See www.pmac.ca.
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