Articles

Change is Hard - May 2023

Bill’s Building Blocks - Change Is Hard
May 2023

Having a routine is healthy. Routine, once it is recognized and can be put into practice, reduces stress and helps to prioritize work. For example, while I was teaching the introductory course, Supply Chain Management, to undergraduates at Rutgers Business School, some students struggled to meet the time deadlines of the course requirements. A few weeks into the course I explained that students needed to conceptualize the course as three independent chunks. Each chunk covered four chapters in the textbook, had four end-of-chapter quizzes, had a homework assignment, and had an hourly exam. Students could then focus and develop a routine around learning the current third of the course and not get overwhelmed by the totality of the coursework. Other courses having a midterm and final exam versus three hourly exams had to be approached differently.

But a change in routine is hard. It disturbs the status quote sometimes causing great internal stress and organizational inefficiency while people debate the change. There is both the change that you initiate and the change that gets imposed upon you. The timing of a change may be like a knife’s edge, or it may be slow and subtle. Supply chains change all the time. Trading partner relationships change, product supply changes, processes change, market demand changes, delivery requirements change, available cash changes, and so forth. Change is a constant in supply chain management.

To make change stick there must be a clear vision of the future state and a compelling reason to make the change. Its net benefit must be real. The change must be ethical with a good fit to the business culture. The real and perceived personal cost of the change must be calculated and communicated. Valuable time must be allotted for public discussion of the change. The intended change must be disclosed to all those impacted before being executed.

Not only is change hard, but it is also hard to keep. This is the people side, the soft side, of supply chain management. A typical case in point goes like this. A new hire is shadowing a long-term employee learning the ropes. The older employee instructs the new employee with, “Here let me show you the way we used to do it, and I personally think this old way is better. But management wants us to do it their new way.”

Such statements and actions erode the investment and make the change much harder.

©2023 William T. Walker, CFPIM, CSCP-F, CLTD-F, CIRM has 42 years practitioner experience mostly with Hewlett-Packard, authored Supply Chain Construction and Supply Chain Architecture, and teaches Supply Chain Engineering at NYU Tandon in Brooklyn. He is a 40+year ASCM member and APICS E&R Foundation past president. email: [email protected]