Saturday, June 26, 2021
Wednesday, June 23, 2021
About Leadership by Storytelling by Dr. Tom DePaoli
About Leadership by Storytelling by Dr. Tom DePaoli
Can you become a great leader by storytelling? Unequivocally! Dr. Tom DePaoli wrote a book to prove it. With his book Leadership by Storytelling: The Best Way to Learn Good Leadership Principles, he reveals some authentic principles of great leadership. The principles are demonstrated with compelling leadership stories that support the beliefs. Dr. Tom provides twenty-six principles of successful leadership. He notes that the oldest methods of passing down knowledge was storytelling. A tribe storyteller would be the keeper of the stories and then pass them down to other tribe members. He recommends the storytelling method for leaders. The stories are original from his and others careers. Each principle has a story to help illuminate the principle. The book has cogent and humorous illustrations for the stories. He urges the reader to gather and share their leadership stories. He believes the growth in leadership abilities will be stronger and quicker via the use of leadership storytelling.
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Learn to lead by stories. #leadership
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/leadership-storytelling-dr-tom-depaoli-dr-thomas-tom-depaoli
Contact Dr. Tom = thomasdepaoli@yahoo.com drtombooks.com for newsletter sign up https://drtombooks.com/contact/ My Books link: https://www.amazon.com/Tom-DePaoli/e/B003XSV1IQHow to Transform an Organization into a Supply Chain Centric Model. It Starts and Ends with People. Why not use Pay-For-Knowledge?
How to Transform an Organization into a Supply Chain Centric Model. It Starts and Ends with People. Why not use Pay-For-Knowledge?
By Dr. Tom DePaoli
For more leadership stories on transforming organizations try my book Leadership by Storytelling on Amazon. https://amzn.to/2ZuuQEz
Most supply chain professionals are familiar with the best practices of a supply chain organization and how to transform purchasing into a lead strategic partner in a company. These usually include a thorough spend analysis to focus on the major areas of materials and services. Another aspect includes the rationalization of suppliers and the formation of a few key partnerships with important suppliers. The institutionalization of a comprehensive sourcing methodology is also crucial. The area that is often overlooked or neglected is the investment in people!
Many purchasing professionals have been rewarded for bureaucratic and tactical behaviors for many years. The culture of risk aversion is prevalent and roles are particularly well-defined and limited. They focus on a particular material or service and become “experts” on these items. Often, they work in silos and have no real connection with operations. It is usually not their choice but the expectations of the culture or of their organization.
The retraining of supply chain professionals begins with developing the capability to lead cross-functional teams not only in sourcing, but in process improvement activities such as Lean and Lean Six Sigma. Most need to reach the level of at least a green belt in a process improvement approach, and to reinvent themselves to be total product experts not just a particular material expert. You have to be a product expert to understand the Voice of the Customer (VOC) or what is really important to them. This requires striving to become an expert in an entire industry not just a narrow material. It also requires a dedication to understanding and working with operations. Performance reviews need to be tied into how well they do in predicting the market trends of their particular industry and meeting or exceeding the VOC.
All too often this training is piecemeal, unorganized and uncoordinated. Fortunately, there is a comprehensive approach that has been around for forty years that works in many industries particularly ones where employee knowledge is highly valued like the chemical, oil and process industries. The approach has been called pay-for-skill or pay-for-knowledge. Employees are paid more for each skill or knowledge area that they develop, and demonstrate their proficiency in by job performance. It does require a significant monetary investment by the organization in training employees and the organization evolves to a continuous learning campus. The word campus is critical because many organizations partner with local technical schools or universities to jointly provide the comprehensive training and courses.
Unfortunately, many organizations have disinvested in training employees and would rather outsource for many skills or functions. This is deadly to the supply chain concept and process improvement, which must strive to constantly improve the entire supply chain from start to finish without breaks which may or may not be performed better by an outsourced entity.
The major objection to the pay-for-skill approach is the cost and the length of time for payback from the employees improved knowledge. Once in place, however; the power of this employee intellectual capital, and the momentum of continuous improvement, establishes a supply chain centric organization that is nearly impossible to beat competitively.
People transform supply chains and organizations not technology or best practices.
https://www.amazon.com/author/tomdepaoli = Dr. Tom’s Amazon author’s page
http://www.apollosolutions.us = website of Apollo Solutions his business
drtombooks.com = more information on Dr. Tom’s books
http://www.linkedin.com/pub/dr-thomas-depaoli/0/736/6b3/ = LinkedIn home page
Learn how to use the supply chain centric model #supplychain
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-transform-organization-supply-chain-centric-model-depaoli-1e
Contact Dr. Tom = thomasdepaoli@yahoo.com drtombooks.com for newsletter sign up https://drtombooks.com/contact/ My Books link: https://www.amazon.com/Tom-DePaoli/e/B003XSV1IQ
How to Save a Billion Dollars in Your Supply Chain Or “the Billion-Dollar Boys” and Mega-Negotiations Story
How to Save a Billion Dollars in Your Supply Chain
Or “the Billion-Dollar Boys” and Mega-Negotiations Story
By Dr. Tom DePaoli
For more Supply Chain stories see my books on Amazon;
Common Sense Supply Management or Common Sense Purchasing.
I and a supply management colleague had been working diligently for a year to try and standardize MRO (Maintenance Repair and Operating) parts to include pumps, pipes and valves, electrical and operating supplies. We divided the storeroom parts into these four bucket areas. These were storeroom related parts for a major process chemical company. We used a market basket sourcing approach. We had conducted numerous strategic sourcing cross-functional teams and had worked hard to get our engineers to select standardized parts for our plants. These sessions were long and arduous. We had reduced the number of suppliers or OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacturers) in many categories to one or two. Our goal was to gradually replace the existing parts as they wore out with the new OEMs and strive for standardization in the MRO arena. We had a systematic well thought out plan for doing this and had negotiated contracts with the OEMs and distributers. We were approximately 80% complete which was quite an accomplishment for the fifty North American plants.
Then the company suddenly announced that they were in the initial stages of planning a five-billion-dollar expansion in the United States. The winning five plants had already been selected. Some of the expansion was to be entirely new plants and the others were major rebuilds. The capital expansion was to start in six months. We were faced with managing a major capital expansion and a significant spend in the MRO area. We met with the Vice-President of engineering and decided to have a strategy session with him and the five selected plant engineers. We decided to have a one-shot bidding meeting with our preferred suppliers in Louisiana. We had a very good idea about the dollar amount of spend in the various buckets for the expansion. The capital job estimates had already been done and approved. We had four bucket areas in MRO: mechanical, electrical, piping and valves and operating supplies. We already had cost plus pricing contracts for 80% of our MRO. We did however still have at least two preferred suppliers in almost every major component MRO area like pumps.
I suggested that we leverage the hard work that we had already accomplished. We would announce the capital expansion at a preferred supplier meeting and give an approximate future dollar spend in each of the four buckets (areas). We obviously had a lot of leverage and many of the bucket dollar numbers were huge. We had fairly accurate data from recent expansions and the capital job estimates. We then established these ground rules for the bidding process:
1. There would be only one round of bids. We urged the suppliers to give the bid their best shot. There would be no second bid rounds. We did not have the time to manage multiple bids.
2. We announced that we would in many cases narrow down the areas where we had two preferred suppliers to one, unless we had a good business reason for keeping two.
3. Although we had negotiated some significant total cost of ownership savings in the current contracts, we were open to enhancements from the suppliers and distributers.
4. We told the suppliers that we would not accept their standard spare parts packages like we had in the past. We would challenge their typical spares packages but would be especially open to creative ways of them controlling and managing the spares at minimal or no cost to us.
5. OEMs could work with distributers to propose any additional creative services to provide us.
Quite frankly we had no idea how this mega-negotiation process would work. Fortunately, we had done a lot of supplier consolidation before this process. We had not had the time to even predict cost savings or eventual outcomes. We just did it. As the bids rolled back in, it was obvious that our suppliers had done their homework. All told the cost and other savings amounted to 20% of the 5 billion dollars or 1 billion dollars! We were stunned. For the next year, I and my supply management colleague, had to endure the “handle” or nickname of “the billion-dollar boys”, whenever we entered a meeting.
Yes, we were good and worked hard, but we were also very lucky. The fact that the company was spending that much capital at one time when we were transforming to supply management really helped our leverage and savings potential.
https://www.amazon.com/author/tomdepaoli = Dr. Tom’s Amazon author’s page
http://www.apollosolutions.us = website of Apollo Solutions his business
drtombooks.com = more information on Dr. Tom’s books
Learn how to save a billion dollars in your supply chain. #supplychain #costsavings #procurement #negotiations
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-save-billion-dollars-your-supply-chain-dr-thomas-tom-depaoli
Contact Dr. Tom = thomasdepaoli@yahoo.com drtombooks.com for newsletter sign up https://drtombooks.com/contact/ My Books link: https://www.amazon.com/Tom-DePaoli/e/B003XSV1IQ