Supply Chain Management

What is supply chain management?

A lot of organisations aren’t familiar with supply chain management yet, which means Henk Kolenbrander often needs to explain what it is exactly. This is a short and simplified version of his explanation.

An organisation wants to sell products and/or services. For the right price, at the right place and at the right time. What is required to make that happen? Both internally and externally, and from raw materials to customer.
If you map all of that, you will see all kinds of links, usually also outside of the organisation itself. In the jargon of this field: plan, source, make, deliver. These links form the supply chain. Managing this chain essentially means making connections between all the links and/or optimising them.

Going in-depth…
Almost every supply chain has its weak links. Finding them is sometimes quite easy, but being able to see where the real cause lies and finding and implementing the right solution for the issue, requires skill. A good supply chain manager needs to be able to go in-depth for each link or connection.
In people’s perception this often involves material matters, moving “things” around, but in reality the human factor plays an equally important role. This means that a good supply chain manager definitely also needs to be a people manager. But that’s not all.

… and avoiding boundaries
Henk warns that you should never draw rigid lines around supply chain management. If you understand what the job involves, you will see that creating strict boundaries around it makes no sense. Supply chain management is in fact connected to a number of different disciplines. An entire world lies behind each part (plan, source, make, deliver). You will need to deal with all kinds of things: strategy, sales, marketing, IT, HR.

Permanently refreshing knowledge
Because supply chain management is a relatively new profession, it is still developing further. And it will probably continue to do so, given the strong interaction with almost all the other disciplines in the chain, none of which stand still. For the supply chain manager this means that life-long learning is a must. Henk Kolenbrander is doing exactly that, permanently and proactively.