Podcast: Ben Bellamy on Transparency and Innovation in Supply Chain

Highlights from the Conversation

Welcome to episode 30 of Supply Chain Next! I’m super excited to have my friend and colleague here today, Ben Bellamy. And in keeping with our tradition here I want to ask you Ben, who are you and how did you get into supply chain?

• I have been in consulting in some form or another throughout my entire career.
• After about 15 years I landed at World50, which brings together top-level Fortune 500 executives for ideation, insights sharing, and peer-to-peer mentoring.
• I fell in love with the power of the community. My imagination went wild thinking about what we could accomplish together.
• The Visibility Council arose from my experience there, combined with my experience in consulting–that we can change otherwise unchangeable systems using the power of a deliberately curated, carefully facilitated community.

Let’s expand on that. You dabbled a little bit in the professional soccer world and that gave way to 15 years of consulting.

How did these combine to get you into World50 and eventually into focusing on supply chain with The Visibility Council?

• At World50 I wasn’t involved with supply chain at all—I had peers that worked with top supply chain executives.
• I actually worked with chief strategy officers. My conversations were built around helping huge corporations navigate uncertain environments. How do you make a five year strategy plan when you don’t know what will happen in the greater environment next year?
• You went way back with the soccer thing…

But it’s interesting! Pro soccer player turned Visibility Council founder…

• I was 19 at the time. I took a break from college and played professional soccer in Vienna, Austria and had an amazing time.
• I realized after a couple of seasons that I was probably going to have a better time making a living with my brain instead of my body. I was always hurt…so when I was 22 I ended my professional sports career after breaking my ankle for the third time.
• I had an entrepreneurial spirit and so wanted to go off and do things on my own.
• I started helping big real estate investment trusts reposition their assets, modernizing their portfolios at the local level.
• I did that up until the recession of 2008, when I got into more traditional management consulting with a company called North Highland.
• I was there up until World50 where I learned so much and met many wonderful people. It was a great few years.

Many people who are listening most likely won’t be familiar with World50, which was recently acquired, and was where we met. I also met Bill Marrin there, who was on our first podcast.

Let’s clarify for our viewers the high quality of networking at World50.

• It’s really difficult to convey that without actually participating in it… I was blown away when I attended my first event with World50.
• The idea here is that they host a really candid environment where powerful conversations are free to flow. They would bring in outside thought leaders to bring in new ideas, help tease out the conversation, and to get members to let go of their day-to-day, tactical challenges and concerns.
• For example, we brought in Clayton Christensen to talk with members about innovation and disruption.

Let me jump in here… these are chief strategy officers of the biggest companies in the world. 

• That’s exactly right. The way I describe it to those who are unfamiliar with World50: once you get to this level you become a bit of a celebrity and have to be very careful with what you say. If you mis-speak or ask a dumb question, it may end up on the front page of the Wall Street Journal or the Financial Times.

Yes. The higher up people of the world’s biggest companies have to be careful with what they say in public spaces. World50 provides a platform where they can talk freely without looking over their shoulder constantly.

• Exactly, and to add to that, the conversations held there were not only about each individual’s industry but about life in general too. It was also about balancing these high level positions while also being a real person–a mother, a father, and a member of your immediate community.
• There were also plenty of conversations about career management, as many people finally reach the pinnacle of their careers as “chief whatever officer” and then realize that they don’t necessarily like it…so now what?
• But the majority of conversations were to discover industry trends—and competitive threats—and how to make these huge organizations more agile in reacting to the trends.

My experience there was as diverse as the industry leaders who participated in the conversations… leaders from FedEx, Ralph Lauren, and eBay (where I was from).

Now let’s talk about how you started The Visibility Council. What drove you to develop The Visibility Council after all of your experience with so many individuals from so many different industries?

• As I was working with the chief strategy officers within World50 I noticed that there were certain transformations affecting entire industries or entire functions, like the energy industry or the supply chain function.
• When an industry changes, its whole ecosystem must change with it.
• One of my favorite academic theories is this whole idea of Ashby’s Law and business evolution: if you transform faster than the system you’re a part of, you will make yourself extinct because you have disconnected yourself from the system. This is also true if you don’t evolve fast enough, of course.
• So if you’re in one of these transforming industries or functions, it would be a significant benefit to you and your organization to coordinate with other ecosystem players, to learn what others are doing, when critical features and capabilities will become available, and to time your actions accordingly. You could actually accelerate and de-risk your own transformation, and maybe accelerate the evolution of the entire industry if you formed a powerful enough coalition.
• At The Visibility Council we’re bringing together everybody, not just supply chain officers, but technology providers, innovators, investors, and thought leaders from academia and industry.
• It’s all about creating and maintaining a safe environment for our members to collaborate and learn from each other and combine their expertise to improve supply chain as a whole.

You started The Visibility Council about 3 years ago. What have you learned about supply chain over the last 3 years?

• If you look at the most powerful supply chain organizations in the world, what they can directly control is only a small fraction of the actual supply chains themselves. Most of what happens in the supply chains are out of their view, and out of their control.
• They are vulnerable to shortages and bad practices upstream and across the verticals and that’s a bad position to be in. This became front and center during COVID.
• Supply chain professionals have really challenging and demanding jobs and they’re never really finished solving problems, even when they’re at home and supposedly done for the day.
• If you mess up it’s a really big deal. The risk awareness and aversion of supply chain professionals is off the charts.
  And yet these people still have to find time to innovate, to disrupt major established systems. And to do a lot of it outside their organization, influencing change in supply partners.

What are the factors that compel these supply chain professionals to tackle these issues at The Visibility Council?

• I think the first thing is that there is an awareness of the transformation within the supply chain world, that the way that we’ve always done things is going to have to change drastically and quickly.
• The supply chain professionals of the world realize that they must evolve to bring resiliency to their operations as a whole. How do we build resiliency and agility into our industries so we’re better equipped to handle the next global crisis, natural disaster, or trade embargo? Because they’re coming.
• We’ve gotten a lot of traction because of the purity of our mission–we’re here to advance the profession, The Visibility Council has no bias, it’s neutral, it isn’t trying to sell anybody anything. We are sincerely trying to advance the discipline across the world with next-generation supply chain principles and technologies and talent.

You have an impressive roster of members. At least 50% of them are from Fortune 500 companies and they all enjoy working together. That’s a big credit to you.

How has the conversation evolved between the members over the last 2 or 3 years?

• It has really been a 3-phase process. We spent a little over a year in phase 1, trying to discover the right starting point, getting to know some of the key figures and what their needs were. Laying the groundwork for showtime.
• We recruited the help of industry veterans to construct a great starting point that could translate to usable real world results as soon as possible. We asked our early contributors, advisors and members to really take ownership in co-creating the Council and its operating tenets. We empowered them to lead us.
• In June of 2020 is when phase 2 began–building the community, developing the trust. We had our first real meeting with nine chief supply chain officers and a few non-CSCO industry veterans. Soon after, they began reaching out to their peers to join.
• We took our time and were very deliberate about building relationships and trust among the members. And that really resulted in the kind of culture that we were shooting for.
• Now the whole thing is running smoothly, we’ve found a lot of commonality in what we’re pursuing, as well as the obstacles and enablers of getting there.
• This is where phase 3 starts–we are going to put the community to work, defining the future and accelerating our journey in getting there, putting real projects and project teams together, putting resources behind the teams, and doing big things.
• This next phase will involve more people from our members’ organizations, as we will be investigating new technologies and processes, determining everything from viability, to implementation timeframes, testing, and more. We don’t yet know where this will end up, but we know that with the people that we have on board, and the buy-in that we have, the possibilities are endless.

I think visibility (or transparency), resiliency, and sustainability are the most important issues when it comes to supply chain.

What else does The Visibility Council consider to be its objectives?

• I would also add agility or adaptability to that list, and efficiency, of course.
• To me, all of the attributes you mentioned are in sequence behind visibility. Once you achieve end-to-end visibility, you will have the ability to recognize areas of vulnerability, you can create resilience. You can recognize environmental and social issues. You can quickly adapt to meet changing customer preferences. You can right-size inventory and speed your cycle times. But all of that comes after visibility.

What is the global supply chain world really thinking about when it comes to digitalization and centralization?

• Not to be cliché but it’s people, processes, and technology. You can’t make any substantive change without touching on all three of these. And changes to people and process are going to be harder to achieve, and more rewarding once they’re realized, than changes to technology.
• We also need more focus on collaboration and data sharing between enterprises—not just within your own organization—and this isn’t easy.
• One of the big challenges is changing everybody’s understanding of partnership and alignment toward value creation.
• When it comes to technology and adaptability, we talk a lot about plug-and-play system architecture for supply chains. We’ve had these old systems around for a long time and to get them to function the way supply chain organizations need them to, those systems had to be heavily modified. And by the time those systems were ready for use, you would have spent hundreds of millions of dollars and many years.
• The constant need to adapt, along with the time that customization takes, means that you can never really quite get to where you want to be. Your capabilities are always going to come after the need has been recognized, sometimes many years after it has been recognized. You’re always going to be behind, trying to catch up.
• We need systems that are interoperable, to easily allow data flow from sourcing to manufacturing, warehouse management, transportation, logistics, distribution and more.
• How can we tackle these issues? What will it cost? What are the timelines? Who are the people involved? Who is paying for these changes? How can we continue to evolve so we don’t get left behind even further?

This involves technology adoption. Most supply chain organizations have never really had their own systems. They’ve always had to use pieces of other systems made for different uses.

Innovation is coming but the supply chain world isn’t known for its adoption of new technologies. How is The Visibility Council tackling this situation?

• We’ve been operating in legacy systems for many years, and adapting these systems will always be more costly and time consuming than using a system that was designed for your specific industry.
• Amazon came along in the 1990s and completely rethought the business of supply chain and consumer oriented markets.
• They created a supply chain first and then built their business around that instead of the opposite way around.
• Something we ask ourselves frequently in The Visibility Council is how does supply chain operations help to better connect the customer to product development and engineering, breaking down the silos to create a true value chain?
• Amazon is holding all of the cards now. They are so outrageously successful that they have literally changed the way that business should run. If competitors don’t adapt—and learn from Amazon’s lead—they will fade away. There’s no going back. Amazon has changed everything in the consumer world with their value chain and now the expectations of consumers are in line with this.
• So at this point we have no choice. We have to be innovators, technology adopters. We have to have our own systems. This is an existential need.

You brought a term there: value chain.

Consumers are paying attention to the whole process: from the extraction of the materials required to produce the products they buy, then to use of those products, and finally to the recycling of those products.

Let’s talk about the differences between a value chain and a supply chain.

• There is a hesitancy in some organizations to use the term value chain because they’ve had their hands slapped by sales and marketing, who sometimes feel a sense of territorialism. They “own” the customer.
• We don’t see things going from end to end, we see the bulk numbers at each step.
• When you can really see the value to the customer right at the stage when extracting a mineral from the earth…that’s when you can see the value chain.
• We need that end-to-end mindset. That helps the whole process of circularity which of course is such a big opportunity for sustainability, reduced mining, etc.

The value chain gives way to a value network. Everything is connected.

• The next generation of supply chain is automation. This will still require human intervention in setting up and optimizing the system, maintaining partnerships, finding opportunities for improvement and creativity, and using the intuition that comes from experience. But we’ve got to stop facilitating every transaction manually. That takes all of our bandwidth.
• We’ve got a long way to go before this happens.
• This evolution of supply chain will take time and won’t really start to become mainstream until much further into the future, for example, when universities are teaching these principles.

Can The Visibility Council help to speed this up?

• Evolution of talent is required to manage the supply networks of the future.
• We need charismatic leaders; disruptors and change agents who are not only tactical geniuses and problem solvers, but who are also digitally fluent and data driven. This is going to require special people.
• It all comes down to talent, and this combination of skills is incredibly hard to find.

What do you see over the next year or two for The Visibility Council?

• Up to this point, we’ve been focused on building our practitioner list, trying to get more big supply chain players into the Council. We are now shifting focus to bring more technologists and innovators into the Council, looking for more diversity.
• We also realize that talent is the keystone, and that we can play a big part in helping to develop leaders of the future.
• We are kicking off a set of initiatives that will incorporate high potentials from our member organizations, enlisting their help in investigating the more foundational enablers of the transparent, resilient, agile and sustainable supply chains. We are putting them in cross-industry, cross-enterprise groups and conducting sprints to advance our knowledge, and to further the development and adoption of next-generation practices and technologies.
• This should lead to years of additional investigative work, as we find, vet and test new solutions, catalog change management playbooks, and find areas for harnessing the intelligence, insights and leverage of our amazing group.
  With everything we do, we are allowing our members to provide guidance as we go into the future. They know best how we can help them.

Connect with Ben Bellamy

Ben is ready to connect on LinkedIn.