Confusing state of SCM training
If you are confused about the training in SCM, you are not alone. Thousands of people around the world express frustration that some people run a SCM course entirely focused on logistics, while others run a SCM course almost entirely focused on procurement, or warehousing, or 3PL, or inventory.
This is not the only confusion about SCM training. People at Director or VP level get frustrated when they have to sit through courses entirely focused on mundane operational aspects of SCM.
At the same time SCM analysts and managers sit through strategic courses they find too airy-fairy and vague.
Similar confusion abounds among the various generations of supply chain management, as well as BAU and BT content - read this article for more details https://globalscgroup.com/why-supply-chain-careers-in-business-transformations-bt-differ-from-supply-chain-careers-in-business-as-usual-bau/
Confusion has a history
When Vivek Sood did MBA in 1995-96 from one of the best businesses schools in the world, there was not a single MBA level supply chain course in the entire world.
Operations management and industrial engineering were the two early streams of study that were closely related to the supply chain management arena.
But the Operations management and industrial engineering continued as two separate entities till the peak times of world war II. During this time the need for improvements in military logistics skyrocketed and the new branch of study was born integrating core values of operations management and industrial engineering.
In 1963 the National Council of Physical Distribution Management was formed and it was the predominant organisation in the field of managing the physical flow of goods though a chain, though the name supply chain management was not yet coined.
The birth of sCM
When our senior partner Dr Wolfgang Partsch and his team coined the term supply chain management in 1978, they created and trained people in the methodology to study the four flows (at that time fifth flow was - risk was not considered) of the supply chain.
For the first two decades of its existence, supply chain management field was largely ignored - both by the universities and the certification bodies.
Meanwhile, with outstanding real world results, savvy companies and their top consultants continued to progress the thought leadership in supply chains, and popularize the concept of five flows and integration / optimisation matrix. I still remember in 2003 being asked on a golf course 'what kind of chains does your company (GLOBAL SUPPLY CHAIN GROUP) supply?'
The bandwagon effect
Seeing the outstanding success of supply chain concepts, eventually most universities and business schools jumped on the bandwagons and created courses, or even entire degrees focused on supply chain management.
At the same time certification bodies who were formerly training inventory analysts, production planners, warehousemen, logisticians, and even drivers and purchasing officers started incorporating supply chain terminology in their course materials and nomenclature.
That is how we have arrived at the situation where we are today and that is one of the reasons for the confusion about the plethora of courses and their varying level of quality and coverage of key supply chain concepts.
