Bain & Company: driving change in the supply chain

Change. If you want to achieve long-term success in the supply chain space then you must welcome it. Change is the key to allowing businesses to thrive in an ever-changing industry. 

Providing companies with a helping hand, the management consulting giants, Bain & Company, has delivered two crucial steps to enable organisations to drive change.

Step one - Minimise bureaucracy and empower innovation

In order to operate with an agile approach, it can sometimes be most effective to allow for team members to make swift decisions without going through senior executives first. While getting rid of bureaucracy could be important, executive involvement remains key as long as it is managed correctly. This could be done by empowering team members through the responsibility of acting quick, resolving big impediments to progress at weekly check-ins and tracking the value captured by the programme as well as keeping an eye on programme risks.

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Step two - Building new capabilities 

Change management is essential to growth. Bain & Company found that companies must deploy tools such as customer immersion sessions, design thinking and rapid prototyping as well as zoning in on innovation and forming a clear digital strategy. In a bid to achieve this, management emphasised four important change capabilities:

• Deploying specialised internal coaches to enable employees to learn and understand the benefits of Agile software development.

• Create a customised Scrum playbook that could be used by teams implementing Agile software development ways of working.

• Hold customer immersion sessions designed to understand the customer needs and their desired solutions more deeply.

• Use one to two day business sprints and design thinking modules to guide rapid prototyping.

To read more, check out Bain & Company’s full article here!

For more information on all topics for Procurement, Supply Chain & Logistics - please take a look at the latest edition of Supply Chain Digital magazine. 

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