Dr. Muddassir Ahmed Discusses Recent Innovations in Supply Chain Education

Transcript from Dr. Muddassir Ahmed Podcast Episode

Can you give us some highlights from your journey into supply chain thought leadership?

• My professional history in supply chain has mostly been in manufacturing and sales and operations planning.
• I have an engineering background; my first degree was a BE in Textile Engineering.
• I’ve always been very practical, which is why my PhD thesis was a research topic, not a case study. I like to solve problems.
• I’ve worked in roles everywhere from the shop floor to demand planning and other leadership roles.
• The more I get into supply chain, the better it gets! I truly believe in supply chain knowledge and solutions for everyone.
• I started blogging under my own name in 2015, but as I learned more about marketing, I decided I needed a brand so we could include other people. I created SCMDOJO in 2018. “SCM” of course stands for supply chain management, and “dojo” is a Japanese word for a place where you learn and train. It was traditionally applied to martial arts, but has been adopted by other fields like meditation and software development.

Did you always want to get into supply chain?

• I’ve always loved travelling for business. Until the coronavirus unfortunately kicked in, I’ve travelled to 38 countries. Someday I hope to reach 50. Wherever I’ve lived, gone to school, or worked, I certainly didn’t end up talking about supply chain around the dinner table.
• If you look at the content I’ve produced, it’s not focused on talking to CEOs, and I’ve received some criticism for that, especially from big brands. The people I want to talk to are aged 22 to 35. They’re either graduates who have just finished degrees or other young people.
• What I’ve seen is that people end up in a job, they start learning about supply chain, they find they like it, and start wondering what they’re going to do next. They may do CIPS or APICS.
• What I’m trying to do with SCMDOJO is create graduate-level courses for young people, so we can get them early on. I’ve also wondered why we don’t have internships for supply chain—we have them for engineering and business. These are the gaps that we have that I’m determined to close.
• The first degree that I did was my engineering degree, and when I started working I realized that I had the wrong degree, and that I’m not an engineer. Don’t get me wrong—that engineering mindset helps me approach things analytically, and to break things down so I can process them better. But my next decision was to go into management, and it was while pursuing my Masters in Production Management that I learned that I really like everything to do with supply chain.
• I think you can see how much I like the topic when I write a blog or do a video. Only passion keeps me awake! Between work and blogging and my family I sleep about five hours a night. You can’t do that without loving it.

Supply chain has always been in the back closet of most businesses, and has had the least amount of respect. Have you noticed an upswing in importance for supply chain?

• Yes, you’re absolutely right. I teach supply chain strategy at the university level part time, and one thing I’ve been telling my students is that you can only do so much innovation with the product or with the business model. So the only way to get more competitive advantage quickly is with supply chain. The classic examples we have of this is Amazon and Apple. Yes, they do product innovation very well, but mostly they are supply chain companies. This is the time to innovate on supply chain.
• Secondly, people are always focused on the business model, but not on the supply chain strategic design. Once they start looking at this, they start realizing how archaic their current business model really is. They often don’t even look at that while they’re successful.
• I’ve heard people complaining about companies coming from China or wherever, and overtaking them. The reason why these companies are overtaking is not because they are competing on costs—that’s the wrong perception. Nine times out of ten they are overtaking because they have a better business model and they have a better supply chain design, and I’ve proved this with many examples.

To me this feels like a white paper on competitive strategy about how supply chain is where you’re going to get the best source of differentiation, cost cutting and ultimately, improved thinking on product, sales and marking, HR, and everything else.

• I think we can write it together! Definitely that’s the point. Product segmentation and customer segmentation is already there; people know how to do that. The game to play right now is lead time segmentation, and lead time segmentation only happens when you look into your supply chain strategic design.
• The fourth segment, which I can tell you hasn’t been researched, is supplier segmentation. I did my PhD thesis on supplier strategic development, and the companies that are focused on developing suppliers and digital transformation of all their economic activities are the ones that are going to succeed. Are they going to do that with their existing supplier base? The answer is probably no. In order to get to that level they need to develop their suppliers. And they can’t do it the old school way, in which you beat them down until they say yes. That’s gone. You have to strategically develop your suppliers in order to create that competitive advantage of speed.
• You’ll need to know:
  • Who are the strategic suppliers you want to develop?
  • How do you want to maintain those relationships?

SCMDOJO has launched an education nexus. What have you learned from launching that platform and how does that connect to the transformation that’s starting to happen in supply chain now?

• I’ve had to start learning SEO, marketing, and WordPress, and that echoes the fact that supply chain people in general haven’t done a good job of promoting the profession. Can you name even ten people who are really cracking on supply chain? No. The content out there is limited compared to other business functions.
• There’s a big gap in manufacturing: it’s a huge industry with a huge body of best practices. But where is the content? Any good knowledge that is there isn’t accessible because it’s so expensive. I have a lot of respect for CIPS and APICS, but they are teaching 20-year old content and they charge huge amounts of money because they have industry credibility. But what they’ve done is excluded 98% of the population who could be getting into supply chain, because these courses are so expensive. It’s a shame, really, because the basic knowledge about supply chain should be available to the masses.
• Most of the topics I write about are things that you can’t find on Google otherwise. If I want to know what are the top strategies to reduce my inventory, there should be a blog about that. I couldn’t find one, so I wrote about it.
• People were asking me about the best masters programs, and while I was writing that I did a matrix. I learned that the approximately 42 top masters programs were teaching 58 courses. There is a lack of diversity and innovation in what they teach. And yet the average cost is $18K per year.
• Barring a few schools like MIT and Cardiff, most of these programs are not even touching on technology. No one is teaching about digital transformation. CIPS talks about AI in procurement, but not about what key skills you need to be a user of AI in procurement. I mean, I’ve had one of the best educations possible, and I think even that was archaic.
• Right now because of COVID we have primary schoolers sitting and working on laptops and using Google. But they’re more advanced than more than half of my workforce!
• In the future we’ll move from a push learning model to a pull learning model. Right now if you go to SCMDOJO you can choose a stream, for example, materials management competencies, and do a self-assessment. You’ll then get a score for different skills, like demand planning, S&OP or forecasting, ethics in supply chain and supply chain risk. SCMDOJO will then recommend content to read. That, for me, is a pull learning system rather than sitting in a class and doing a test on things you already know through your experience and your previous education. In the next five years, we’ll be closing the gap by creating a lot of courses and guides. It will be super affordable and people will be able to learn wherever they are in the world.

What is it that you want to put into your educational content that’s missing in existing educational content?

• Several things. Imagine a Venn diagram with three circles:
  • The core supply chain curriculum and technical knowledge, including all the fundamentals.
  • Soft skills and emotional intelligence, including communications and storytelling.
  • Technology.
• The core fundamentals should take 3 – 6 months to learn, not two years, and should not cost $18K a year. But a lot of this knowledge is not being taught. Nine times out of ten, supply chain graduates interviewing for a supply chain planning job can’t explain to me the logic of materials requirements planning (MRP). Same thing with strategic sourcing, and other technical topics that have existed for twenty years and that I would call part of the hygiene factor.
• Soft skills need to be taught. Most of us in manufacturing have an operations or engineering background, and are good on execution once we have the idea. But we need to think about how to work with people and how to speak. Anyone working in procurement will tell you that 90% of their time is spent managing people and business relationships. I would also include basic marketing in this.
• Technology is very important. If I was to ask people the difference between artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, how many could explain it to me? People are using terms without knowing what they mean. Similarly, what about blockchain, 3D printing, or cloud computing infrastructure? The reason we need to learn these things is to make smart decisions about tools: any software is useless if you don’t know what it’s designed to do.

How is SCMDOJO doing in terms of following?

• We’re now seeing over 80K page views per month and 50K+ followers and the monthly newsletter has 27K subscribers. 85% of our traffic is organic (through Google search results)—I don’t do anything other than write the content and the rest just happens.
• At some point I hope to do this full time. But don’t forget I’ve got a full-time job that I’m dedicated to and a family to look after as well.
• The long term strategy is to have content based on three pillars:
  • The core knowledge courses
  • Community
  • Freelancing
• The reason for the freelancing is that I totally believe that any incentivized activity in supply chain can be outsourced or subcontracted to a subject matter expert. I believe in this 100% and that people will start to see this over the next three to five years. It will only happen because of the drive towards digitalization of supply chain.
  • For example, it’s hard to find a good demand forecaster. But once you find that person, you only need them once a month when you do your planning.
  • What we need is a platform to connect people to the businesses that need their skills.
• In the next few months you’ll see a lot of web development on SCMDOJO if my plan goes well.
• I’m seeing good growth, especially in the digital downloads.

What has surprised you the most about the industry and the people on your journey?

• Despite people knowing about all the good stuff, the game changing technology like cloud solutions and AI, there’s a huge lack of desire to make it happen.
• Let me give you an example. For me, SAP single-handedly killed innovation in supply chain. That sounds like a big claim to make, but I can substantiate it. This is because SAP built their solution, and everybody ended up using it (or Oracle, because between the two of them they cover almost 70% of the industry), but their innovation is pretty rubbish. Compare that with what’s happened in sales and marketing over the last ten years. Compare that with the fintech industry.
• The big companies with big supply chains are basically using the same version of SAP that they were five to six years ago. What about cloud? What about using business intelligence (BI)? Every three or six months I have to download my MRP planning data, hire a planner, do the accommodations, and set up my safety stock. When the data is going through the system, why isn’t it giving me a predictive indicator? It should be telling me a prescriptive for how much safety stock I need. I don’t need a planner for that; it should be molded into the enterprise resource planning (ERP). For me, that lack of vision from the industry leaders is astonishing.

What are the big transformations that you see coming in the next five years in supply chain, as an industry across verticals?

• There will be more vertical integration as a result of the coronavirus.
• Education will become more accessible, and if it doesn’t I will do it myself.
• Right now supply chain is not considered a C-level topic on the board. I think that very soon we’ll see more chief operating officers on the board advising CEOs.

Listen to the full conversation on SoundCloud

More About Muddassir Ahmed

Muddassir has been a supply chain professional since 2001. Currently the regional planning and operations manager for Bridgestone EMEA, Muddassir has held supply chain leadership roles in a number of companies with global reach. He was formerly the logistics director for Doncasters, and divisional supply chain manager for Eaton Electrical & Electronic Manufacturing, amongst others.

He earned his PhD in management science from Lancaster University Management School in 2015 after having completed his thesis on “Enhanced Supplier Development Framework: a Systematic Approach to Improve Supplier Performance”. He is also a Six Sigma Black Belt, a certification he earned while researching multivariate statistical analysis to identify relations between inputs and outputs for Volvo Car Corporation in Sweden.

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