Greetings from Melbourne, Australia. Tonight, I have dined on Tasmanian salmon, enjoyed a snack of Tim Tam fingers, and dipped Wattle cookies into my coffee. I traveled over 10,000 miles. It has been a very long day.
I will be speaking on Monday at “Mastering Supply Chain Management with SAP” by the Eventful Group. I am excited to talk to an Australian audience and welcome them to the SCI Community. I will share more on these insights later this week (probably from an uncomfortable plane seat somewhere over the Pacific on my way home).
Lots Going ON!
We now have 240 participants in the SCI Community. My goal is to have over 6000 supply chain leaders active in the community by February 2014. Slowly people are getting their sea legs and building confidence to share their voice. One manufacturer has asked for benchmark data, one has submitted a question to a wizard, but no one has had the courage to share a technology/consulting partner rating or review. You could be the first! Congrats to Karen Conway at GHX for jumping in head first. She is our Featured Leader on the SCI Community leader board this week. I love her leadership in Healthcare. And General Mills is leading the contest to sign up the most community members to get a free training day, along with signed copies of the book Bricks Matter for the supply chain team (the contest ends on October 31st).
Watch your mailbox this week. More reports are on the horizon. I am spending the weekend working with the Supply Chain Insights team (via Skype) to finish up three new reports that will publish in the Supply Chain Insights newsletter next week. (You can still sign up for the newsletter .) This will make our 11th report published since we founded the company in February 2012. All of our reports are available on slideshare. (We had 3,000 views of our reports this month.)
A new webinar series is also being kicked off. We’re currently finalizing the content for our first webinar in the series. Over 100 supply chain executives have signed up so far. It is great to see old friends on the list. In this webinar, we will be sharing twenty years of financial data along with insights on how companies have performed on the Supply Chain Effective Frontier. This webinar has been six months in the making, and I am proud to co-host it with Abby Mayer, Research Associate, Supply Chain Insights (@indexgirl). Please sign up for the webinar while open seats remain. It is the first of a series of webinars that we will be doing (one per month) to help you and your supply chain team better understand supply chain excellence.
The book page proofs of Bricks Matter, co-authored with Charles Chase, have also arrived from Wiley. We have a burgeoning file of 65 sign-offs (and ten refusals) for artwork and stories to be included in the book. All these changes caused a flurry of activity at the end. The book is a retrospective of thirty years of supply chain leadership. It is chock-full of case studies, quotes and data. Wiley has told me that the book is so well written that they have moved the publishing date up from December 24th to early December. Next Saturday, I will spend the entire day going through the manuscript for the final (yes, FINAL) set of edits. This is the thirteenth set of edits. The book took six months to write and four months of begging for sign-offs/permissions. But it is almost done.
How Can You Help?
I am working hard to redefine the analyst model. My goal is to make research more relevant, actionable and available. I believe that research sells and relationships renew. So, you might be saying, how do I help Lora to change the analyst model? There are three favors that I would ask:
- Join our Community. The community is free and available to all that care about supply chain. Sign up your team at the Supply Chain Insights Community. Come join in a conversation, and add your voice and share your opinions on supply chain excellence. Try a rating and review. If you have gone to an event and it was great, give it a rating. If you have gone to an event and it was bad, let others know.
- Use our Research. Our research is designed to be leveraged. We want it to be used. We want to become the brand standard for business leaders trying to understand the definition of supply chain excellence. Read it. Use it. And let us know your feedback.
- Complete our Surveys. Open research is only possible when people fill out our surveys. We have four in the field right now, and we would love your help in completing one:
- For technology providers, consultants and manufacturers, let us know your thoughts on Transportation Management: http://tinyurl.com/sci-trn-b
- A special study of retailers to understand what should be the Role of the Store: http://tinyurl.com/sci-ros-b
- A study on the use of channel data focused at retailers and consumer products companies. Downstream Data: http://tinyurl.com/sci-dsd-b
- How has digital marketing affected trade promotion budgets? And how will this shift affect trade promotion practices? To know, help us by filling out our study on Trade Promotion: http://tinyurl.com/sci-tpm-b
All the best! We at Supply Chain Insights are having fun. Many thanks to our 42 customers that have helped us by buying services (speaking, webinars, advisory workshops and strategy days) in our first six months of business. We are committed to serving the supply chain leader through open, relevant research.
