Hi, I’m Jithin Sunil- A final year MBA student from Amrita School of Business. Welcome to my Logistics and Supply Chain Management learning room. In this blog I am going to talk about various lessons for a sustainable supply chain that can be learned from English football.
It may not seem like the English Football
League System and supply chain sustainability have anything in common. However,
there are interesting parallels between the two systems, and there are lessons
that supply chain directors can learn from the leagues.
Football clubs tend to fall into one of three
groups:
Top Flight Football Teams: Manchester United, Chelsea, Arsenal, are year in and year out at the top of the Premiership. Yeah, they have great players, but one of the key reasons they hold their positions is that their owners invest in the team and its supporting systems (training, youth clubs, leadership, marketing).
Then
the No Hope Clubs are here, which will possibly never make it to the
Premiership. The No Hopers are the clubs that fans were born loving, that
linger with very little hope of rising up at the bottom of League One or Two.
Every now and then, they may have a good run, the team and the fans may have
great heart and soul, but their owners do not have the will or the resources to
make permanent changes.
Finally,
there are the Yo-Yo Clubs, which, with relative frequency, leap and fall
through promotion and relegation. Yo-Yo clubs are, apparently, a phenomenon
across all football associations. One of the best examples is West Brom, and
their ups and downs are often blamed on the insistence of the ownership on
sound financial management, putting them at a disadvantage against teams whose
owners are willing and able to outspend them.
A
similar trend is followed by supplier involvement with sustainability. In
integrating sustainable practises, a few suppliers are leaders, many never seem
to get it, and then there are others who come in and out of participation.
Increasingly,
supply chain administrators want manufacturers to abide by the values of
sustainability and to put in place sound strategies and procedures, just as
owners , managers and supporters want their football clubs to win the
championship.
What lessons can supply chain directors learn from football?
It’s all about the ownership. :The football club has a fighting
chance of rising through the ranks, if the owners care about results. Suppliers
are no different: Ownership commitment matters. One of the most experienced
sustainability managers I know says she can say whether they buy into the
sustainability agenda within five minutes of meeting factory owners. No one
below them would, if they don't get it.
Invest: Financial investment is crucial to
success, like football teams that rise rapidly to the top (Manchester City, for
instance). In light of the exorbitant money that rich owners are lavishing on
clubs these days, I know this is controversial to say, and I'm not suggesting
that businesses can or should invest frivolously. It may be prudent, however,
to take a hard look at where you might invest with suppliers , especially those
that are important to your company and prone to yo-yo-ing. Companies are
developing interesting models for this — investment funds, innovation funds or
joint ventures to develop leading technologies and skills.
Great individual players don’t ensure success. A faltering club
that buys a top player is not guaranteed to rocket to the top of the table.
Likewise, a supplier might have great factory floor managers, an HR manager who
is really switched on, or a group of employees who have participated in a
leading training program. But this is not enough. The supplier must have a
sustainability strategy and related systems in place to ensure longevity in
their commitment.
Encourage transparency. By virtue of their success, the top clubs are exposed to the press and have further to fall if they fail. Encouraging suppliers to be more transparent can have a similar effect. If suppliers share information about their sustainability practices with you and their other customers, it will be harder for them to hide and easier for you to discuss opportunities. This can keep them engaged over the long term.
The
major difference here is that making supply chains more sustainable is not a
zero-sum game; even suppliers that seemed to fall into the No Hope Club can be
transformed with the right strategies in place. There's room at the top.
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