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From natural disasters like hurricanes and earthquakes to pandemics, cyberattacks, and labor strikes, companies have to navigate so many complexities to get goods where they need to go.
What's their secret weapon to operating within the unknown?
It’s the people.
Welcome to Supply Chain Champions, the show that showcases the stories of those who keep supply chains running smoothly. We're here to highlight their untold stories and share lessons they’ve learned along the way.
Join us as we peel back the curtain on the people who make supply chains work and enhance your own career in the process.
Tune in. Get smart. Move forward.
Ted Stank [00:00:00]:
I would say the biggest challenge that we have to deal with, and it's an umbrella challenge, is uncertainty. Uncertainty in geopolitics, uncertainty in climate change, uncertainty in labor markets. Supply chain managers today need to be able to have a team that has the right skill sets that can deal with things that'll change on a 24-hour basis.
Eric Fullerton [00:00:27]:
Welcome to Supply Chain Champions, the show brought to you by project44, where we're talking to the people who make supply chains work. Hello and welcome to Supply Chain Champions. I'm your host, Eric Fullerton. And today we are joined by someone responsible for shaping the next generation of supply chain leaders. The Bruce Chair of Excellence in the Haslam College of Business, the Department of Supply Chain Management at the University of Tennessee, and the Co-executive Director of the Global Supply Chain Institute, Ted Stank. Ted, thanks for being here.
Ted Stank [00:01:03]:
Hey, Eric, thanks. Thanks for having me.
Eric Fullerton [00:01:05]:
So you've been a professor of supply chain management for a long time and I think there's been a lot of evolution and focus in the practice and the profession. Increased legitimacy in terms of the coursework. We've seen majors and MBAs offered in this. And then there's some social acceptance, I think too. You walk on the street and people know what you're talking about when you say supply chain. So my question for you is, what was that inflection point when you kind of realized from your purview like, whoa, something is going on here?
Ted Stank [00:01:40]:
Yeah, you're right. It absolutely has been an evolution. It scares me even to say I've been doing this for 35 years. Formally. I started in a doctoral program in 1990. We didn't call it supply chain management then. It was still kind of all the component parts of supply chain management, but not all together as an integrated whole. And it has, it has really evolved over those 35 years.
Ted Stank [00:02:04]:
Like so many trends that were accelerated by the COVID pandemic. It was beginning to be viewed as an integrated whole that was more than the sum of its parts. Starting, I would say, in the early 2000s and moving through the 2000s, big companies were starting to recognize that you could compete through supply chain management. They were starting to get CEOs that had supply chain management experience, led by our big retailers, you know, Walmart, Amazon, of course, is a supply chain company. And I think a lot of people were starting to say, wow, if that works for them, maybe we need this too. General Motors has a CEO, came through supply chain management and there's a number of others. So that trend was building during the 2010s and then COVID hit. And because of the global structure of our supply chains, so many companies couldn't sell, didn't have product.
Ted Stank [00:02:59]:
And I think the spotlight turned on to supply chain as one of the big value drivers that firms and governments needed to pay attention to in order to be able to meet their mission, if you will. I always say that during the first Trump administration, almost every day there was a news conference with President Trump and Anthony Fauci, and every day at 5 o'clock they would say to the world, our problem is a supply chain problem. And I think that just brought so much recognition.
Eric Fullerton [00:03:29]:
Did you see that impact in the classroom where more people signing up for the majors, the MBAs, or certain classes as electives or part of their core curriculum?
Ted Stank [00:03:41]:
It was a trend that was happening already and we were a bit ahead of the power curve because we had such great partnerships that companies were hiring our students at high salary levels. So we were already starting to build, but just to give you some data points, when I started at Tennessee in 2003, we graduated about 140 undergraduates in what we then called logistics and transportation. It wasn't a supply chain program, yet today we graduated about 450 in integrated supply chain management. So there you have that trend, right? And it's not shrinking, it's growing in double digit percentages every year.
Eric Fullerton [00:04:20]:
Okay, so I'm going to do a podcast faux pas and I'm going to ask you a very open ended question, but I want to know, and as concisely and succinctly as you can put it, how do you prepare students for a career in supply chain? Like, what are the key things they need to know?
Ted Stank [00:04:40]:
Two questions there, right? One is how do we prepare them? And the other one is what do they need to know? One of the real challenges of supply chain management, if you think of it as kind of like an onion with these core knowledge at its center, but then almost every year we build additional layers on it that somebody who is going to be a great supply chain manager has to learn and it just continues to add. So at the undergraduate level, we focus on that core, right? It's an understanding that supply chain is a discipline area that can add great value for customers. So it's this customer focus that you tend to think of as a marketing and sales kind of thing, but we do so many things in supply chain management that cost money. And we need to understand why we're investing that money and what impact it has on customer value. Because at the end of the day, if it doesn't create customer value, we shouldn't be doing it. So that's one core concept, is to understand that it's not about managing cool operational processes, but it's about doing things that create value, which I think is a big change from the past. Operations used to focus on distribution, on efficiency.
Ted Stank [00:05:48]:
Let's be more efficient, let's be more efficient, drive cost down. And you find that a lot of companies in their operational areas were doing things that were really efficient, but nobody gave a crap about. No customers cared. And so one of the things we really try to get our students to understand is efficiency is really important, but only if it creates value. And then you got to build in the basics, right? Plan, source, make, deliver, return. Those are the key building blocks operationally of a supply chain. So we got to give our, our students a good depth of knowledge in those areas. Today we got to build technical skills.
Ted Stank [00:06:25]:
Every student needs to be able to access data, analyze data, use it to make good decisions. So we have to increasingly build analytics around that core base and then we got to build soft skills, right? Because supply chain management is still a very human, intensive discipline. And if you can't work well with others, and particularly as you rise to the organization, you can't lead others, you're going to fail. And it's not only others within your organization, but it's your customer base and your supply base and your service providers. So you got to build all those things. That's probably enough for an undergraduate to try to swallow, but we also teach graduates and we teach senior execs and certification programs. And for them, how do you convert what you do operationally into the financial language of the firm, Right? Because you're going to need investment, you need to be able to say how you're going to return on investment and get ROI and things like that.
Ted Stank [00:07:20]:
So with our senior execs is a big focus on the financial part of it. Clearly leadership skills are a big part of it. How do you work in a global cross cultural setting where you may go into work and you're leading a team that has people from, you know, four different continents and eight different countries and all speaking different languages. So how do you lead in that scenario? Risk management increasingly important in this highly volatile environment that we live in today. So those are, those are kind of building on the outside edges of that onion, if you will. It adds every year, you know, I mean, would a supply chain manager who got their degree in operations management in 1988 and is now a Chief supply chain officer think that they would ever have to be really adept at geopolitics and demographics. That's the what how is. I'm a firm believer in giving people the basics in a classroom environment, so you know, maybe that's 34 to 40% of learning and understanding, but then sending them out in the field and giving them real world experience and hands on experience, I think you can't succeed without it.
Eric Fullerton [00:08:29]:
Right.
Ted Stank [00:08:29]:
In our undergraduate program, we push our students. They're required to do one internship, we push them to do two internships. Those students who come out with a sound understanding of what we've taught them in the classroom and two successful internships are snapped up like that by our partners.
Eric Fullerton [00:08:45]:
One of the things I ask on the podcast is what's one trait that all the best supply chain professionals seem to have in common? I'm going to twist it a little bit to ask about students. If you can nail it down to one trait that all of the best supply chains students seem to have in common, what would you say that Is.
Ted Stank [00:09:06]:
This probably going to surprise you, but I'm going to say passion. It's amazing. Some of our best students, I'm glad, maybe I would have been different if I was a student today, but our best students, they are amazingly passionate about what they're learning. They're attentive in the classroom. They go out and do two or three internships, they are working with our partner firms on projects. They're engaged in our student clubs and leading those clubs to build their leadership skills. It's pretty amazing.
Ted Stank [00:09:38]:
Students sometimes, like junior undergrads, that's when they have to really declare a major. At University of Tennessee, they'll say, I'm thinking about a couple of different majors. And I'll say, if you were the kid who in middle school and early high school, when you ran with your friends and somebody's bike broke down, you were the one that said, get out of the way, I'll fix the bike. You're a supply chain major and you see it at senior executives. They're passionate about what they do and that gives them the drive to continue to learn. It gives them the drive to succeed in environments that they're not familiar with, to understand and be able to emote to different kinds of people from different backgrounds. I think that's the root cause.
Eric Fullerton [00:10:20]:
The answer is usually something around finding and fixing problems, right?
Eric Fullerton [00:10:26]:
Right.
Eric Fullerton [00:10:26]:
And then us that have to that.
Ted Stank [00:10:27]:
That's where I was getting that with the bike chain, right?
Eric Fullerton [00:10:30]:
Yeah, of course. Exactly. Exactly. For those of our listeners who don't know Tennessee is considered the top supply chain management program in the United States, number one in many different rankings. Ted, why do you think that is?
Ted Stank [00:10:44]:
Business academia is broken. It is broken because our incentive and metric system is broken. We bring in brilliant people and we incentivize them to do increasingly complex and elegant research from a statistical standpoint, and don't incentivize them to do anything that makes a hill of beans difference to our practice base. So if you were to open up what we would consider our top academic journals today, you, you would read about the first three paragraphs and begin to yawn and into your fifth paragraph you'd say this is a bunch of BS and throw it aside. That to me is tragic because we've got some really smart people, but we're directing them to do stuff that's not moving the needle on where the world needs to move the needle out. What we have been able to do at University of Tennessee, and I'll attribute it to a top down and bottom up approach. The bottom up approach is we have a bunch of people who lead our program who believe firmly that our feet need to be anchored in industry practice with our partners, that you can't do good business scholarship from your office. You have to be out working with industry, understanding what they're struggling with, seeing what some companies are trying that work and understanding what scenarios it works and what scenarios it doesn't work so that we can identify best practices.
Ted Stank [00:12:08]:
But that requires you to be out working in the field. It mesmerizes me to think that most of our other programs in academia, I'm talking business academia, because this exists, this philosophy exists in a lot of engineering and sciences where they're, you know, they're actually out doing work. We realized a long time ago through some of our early leaders and continues today through our leadership at our college, at our university and our system level who really support us, that if we're going to really be the program we need to be, we need to have very, very strong research capabilities and very, very strong practical knowledge and practical relationships so that we can take those research skills and apply it in the field. So we have 26 faculty in our supply chain group. 14 of them are who we would call tenure track research faculty. All of those selected when we hire to be people who have work experience and are open to working with industry, which believe it or not, is relatively unique. Well, you've probably sat through classes and said how in the world is this person qualified to be teaching business and then the other 12 are what we call professors of practice. Many of them come from a career of 25 to 30 years in industry at the vice president, chief operating officer level.
Ted Stank [00:13:35]:
And I think what we do differently is that those folks are part of our leadership team. We don't just hire them and say, go to the classroom, teach what you know, and keep your mouth shut because you don't know academia, but they are part and parcel of our leadership team. After this podcast, I have a Global Supply Chain Institute leadership team meeting. There's eight of us. Five of them are these professors of practice. What that enables us to do is to really. It enables us to innovate.
Ted Stank [00:14:03]:
It enables us to say, hey, this is what industry really needs an academic organization to do. It enables us to run ideas up the flagpole and bat around ideas. And some of them we say, no, those aren't such great ideas. Other ones we say, let's try it. It enables us to be bold in saying we don't need institutional financial support to do the things we're going to do. Most academics will tell you, well, if the university is going to provide me with a, you know, a grant to do this, I'll do it. We come up with innovative ideas. We run it by our industry advisory board.
Ted Stank [00:14:36]:
And if they think it's a good idea, we say, okay, great, can you guys support it? Because it's going to create value for you. Here's your roi. And more often than not, they'll say, yeah, how much do we need to write a check for now? That means that every year we need to go back to them and say, are we creating value? And we've had some things that, you know, that run their course. We just sunsetted a program that has been one of my pet programs for 12 years because the market has changed. So I think that's the magic sauce, is we run our programs like a business and we have industry folks who contribute to that as much as our academic research folks.
Eric Fullerton [00:15:15]:
You mentioned a little bit about the Global Supply Chain Institute. That's something you founded, grew. What is that? What does it mean?
Ted Stank [00:15:24]:
It's pretty understandable that in our academic department of supply chain management, we teach undergraduates, full-time MBAs, PhD students and do research, academic research, but we're a very entrepreneurial college. And so we had people all over the college doing different things with industry in an informal basis, doing certification programs, doing consulting projects, doing supply chain audits for companies. I remember Procter & Gamble talking about this many years ago, that they go into a grocery store. And every different department head in a grocery store had a different person they dealt with at Proctor & Gamble. And we were finding the same thing that we had all these different voices talking as supply chain management. And we needed to pull all that under one umbrella organization. So our Global Supply Chain Institute is a matrix organization that encapsules all of our industry outreach activities.
Ted Stank [00:16:22]:
A Supply Chain Forum, which is an educational conference organization, something we call the Advanced Supply Chain Collaborative, which is applied research. Our certification programs, open enrollment and customized for individual companies, executive MBA programs and online MS Programs, they're all housed under the Global Supply Chain Institute and it's matrixed into the Department of Supply Chain Management because most of the talent, that resource those programs come from the department. So the department provides them with their financial backing, their HR backing, et cetera, but they often work in programs that are housed under the Global Supply Chain Institute.
Eric Fullerton [00:17:02]:
You know, we're in 2025, it's, it's going to be an interesting year. There's a lot of things that are either maybe going to happen. There's a lot of concerns, there's a lot of kind of planning and important activities going on right now. I wanted to kind of get from your purview, when you look at 2025, can you kind of nail it down to what is the problem to solve in supply chains as we look forward?
Ted Stank [00:17:33]:
This relates back to what does it take to be a great supply chain manager? If you don't have that passion, you could get frustrated really quickly because of what's been coming at us. I would say the biggest challenge that we have to deal with, and it's an umbrella challenge, is uncertainty. Uncertainty in geopolitics, uncertainty in climate change, uncertainty in labor markets. We are in a period of such volatility and uncertainty that I think supply chain managers today need to be able to have a team that has the right skill sets that can deal with things that'll change on a 24 hour basis. We might wake up tomorrow morning and just think about what's happened in the last two years. One day you wake up and a giant container ship goes adrift in the Chesapeake Bay and knocks down a bridge in Baltimore. A group that always reminds me of something from Star wars called the Houthi Rebels start shooting ships trying to get through the Red Sea and the Suez Canal. And so now we have to send ships all the way down around the Horn of Africa like we did in the 1800s.
Ted Stank [00:18:40]:
Potentially massive labor strike coming up on the east coast that's going to shut down all the ports, A brand new administration that's going to do an about face on so many different policies that we've gotten comfortable with the last few years. All this uncertainty. And you know, in the past when we would develop people, we would say, hey, here's how we do this. We've been doing it this way for 15 years. You need to learn how to do this, get really good at it. And if you can do that, you'll be really good at your job. Now we have to tell people, okay, here's some tools in your toolkit. Tomorrow is probably going to be very different than today, and you need to be really adept at understanding what's different and what tool do you need to bring out to deal with this different thing.
Ted Stank [00:19:23]:
And by the way, that might work tomorrow. And then two days from now, all bets are off and things might change again. That's what we have to deal with in 2025, I think. Again, we started learning this during COVID For 30 years, our focus in supply chain was driving cost, driving cost, driving cost. And during COVID that had to shift to resiliency. And I'm not going to say cost isn't important, but smart companies are still focused on resiliency because of that uncertainty.
Eric Fullerton [00:19:51]:
I know that you do a lot of consulting and exec education for a lot of groups. It's Fortune 500 organizations to even. I think I saw the Air Force and Marine Corps. When you're brought in for these projects, like, I guess I have two questions. One, what are they trying to learn and know, right? What is the focus of those? And two, if you could share an example, either of what you've done recently or one that's coming up that you thought was interesting and wanted to share.
Ted Stank [00:20:21]:
We all get into our comfort zones and we know how to do something really well. And then again, the world changes around us and it's not easy for us to say, well, we're just going to adapt and do something different. And so usually the goal of most of those kind of outreach programs we do is to try to get the team who are talented individuals, try to get them to start thinking about what they do differently. How do they look up and down the supply chain and say, oh, I've always been doing this and this does this to you in a really bad way. I never knew that. What if I did it differently? What if we talked about it? That's really the goal of what we do.
Eric Fullerton [00:20:56]:
Yeah, makes sense. So I wanted to close with a couple kind of like rapid Fire style questions. So what is one thing you wish that everyone who worked in supply chain knew and the industry would be better for it?
Ted Stank [00:21:13]:
It would be the financial implications. The broad overarching financial implications of great supply chain management. We are too often forced into chasing unit cost reduction and sometimes that does really awful things to the overall financial picture. So I wish everyone knew that sometimes spending more money and having increased costs can have major financial benefits by reducing working capital and increasing revenues. Most business unit leaders think that growth comes from buying other companies or finding new customers. What if we did what we do better and our existing customers bought more from us? I had a conversation with chief supply chain officer for of a Fortune 10 company yesterday about that. So that would be my thing is that everyone in the supply chain and everyone who interacts with the supply chain from our senior business leaders and marketing leaders understood the full financial benefits of end to end integrated supply chain management and didn't just put us in a cost reduction bucket.
Eric Fullerton [00:22:23]:
Awesome supply chain trends. There are plenty of them out there. I would like your take on one of them that is overrated and one that is underrated.
Ted Stank [00:22:35]:
Okay. Overrated right now. If we look at a static point in time, overrated right now is AI.
Eric Fullerton [00:22:43]:
I knew you were going to say that.
Ted Stank [00:22:45]:
We have made some progress with it. Are you familiar with the Gartner hype curve? AI is at the top of that. It's going to solve world peace. We're all going to be living in colonies on the moon run by Elon Musk. By the way. It's going to do everything for us. Maybe in 50 years or 100 years. Right now we are taking baby steps and so we need to figure out where it's going to be able to help us.
Ted Stank [00:23:08]:
And we found some areas. I think the initial places in supply chain are going to be in planning and in risk management and maybe in just managing our own personal day. I've been using it a lot and I find tremendous efficiencies just in my day, but it's overrated in what we say it's going to do. We need to get smarter about how we're going to use it and just take steps, right? Underrated. My summary would be that every smart supply chain manager that has hiring responsibility needs to spend 70% of their time on recruitment, development and retention of their team.
Ted Stank [00:23:45]:
Everything else is going to fade in importance if you can't do those three things. We've seen it in the last few years in restaurants, right? You know service organizations like that.
Eric Fullerton [00:23:55]:
Yeah. In every nearly every aspect of day-to-day life.
Ted Stank [00:23:59]:
Yeah, yeah.
Eric Fullerton [00:24:00]:
All right, so we are a podcast, so we like some hot takes. I know you have your own podcast as well, Tennessee on supply chain management. So I think you're familiar with the hot take mentality and the approach based on our conversation about that. So folks, if you to hear TED talk about industry trends, what's going on in market, I would, I would check out Tennessee on supply chain management, but I want your hot take on the supply chain industry today.
Ted Stank [00:24:30]:
The most exciting, dynamic business discipline you could possibly get into. Unless you're smart enough to go to work for a hedge fund and make multi millions of dollars a year. Changing constantly. What happens on the front page of the news affects your life directly on a daily basis. You get to work with incredible people doing amazing things. We make incredible stuff. You hear people like, you know, chief supply chain officer of Pfizer talking about how their life changed during COVID because of the ramp up in 18 months of that COVID vaccine. I mean that was equal to the moonshot and that was driven by supply chain people.
Ted Stank [00:25:13]:
And it's going to become more of that kind of stuff as we move ahead because of the craziness of the world. And there's a hell of a lot of problems out there.
Eric Fullerton [00:25:24]:
Ain't that the truth. Well, you know Ted, thank you very much for joining us today. I think you embody in your role, your profession and your attitude, you embody the Supply Chain Champion mentality that we're going for. So thank you very much for spending some time with us, sharing your expertise and your perspective. We really appreciate it.
Ted Stank [00:25:44]:
Eric, thanks for having me on. This has been really fun. Anytime.
Eric Fullerton [00:25:50]:
Thank you for listening to Supply Chain Champions. To get connected and learn more, visit project44.com and click the link in the comments. To subscribe to project44's newsletter. Tune in, get smart, and move forward.