‘An American pencil versus China’ on the menu at supply chain expo

The recent 2009 Sapics Conference fielded a diverse mix of presentations, from pencils to pharmaceuticals, South Africa to San Diego, lean to green, and oil to outsourcing, providing international and South Africanflavoured offerings to suit the tastes of all of the 800-plus delegates who attended. The Association for Operations Management of Southern Africa (Sapics) hosts the annual event in collaboration with the Supply Chain Council. Dr Stephen Franks, strategic adviser at RiverLogic Inc in the United States, demonstrated to delegates the competitive opportunities to be found in the global financial crisis. “This global cash crunch seems irreversible, and without new rules of engagement, the challenges for growth will be insurmountable,” Franks said. “However, there is a silver lining - it is called Integrated Business Planning (IBP).” He demonstrated how IBP provided the strategic planning and consistency framework that unified plans across business functions. “Using this framework, you will understand how to quickly identify and capture shortterm, cash-generating opportunities to fund longterm strategic growth.” He used international, real-world examples to prove the point. In a case study entitled “An American Pencil vs China”, David Seeber, vice president of manufacturing at the General Pencil Company, USA, a manufacturer of classic wooden pencils, shared his experiences in competing with China’s vast, low-cost manufacturing capabilities. Seeber said he had worked to make the US pencil manufacturing industry more competitive by designing and implementing manufacturing techniques that minimised labour, improved quality, shortened delivery time and reduced costs. China featured once again in the form of speaker Kien Leong, general manager at JCIT Asia Pacific in China. His presentation on “Planning and Execution Excellence for Customer Fulfilment” challenged some of the assumptions and logic that are at the heart of production and material planning. He demonstrated how manufacturers could make substantial improvements to their operating performance by simply looking at the planning cycle in a different way. Drawing on both concepts and real-life examples, he led the attendees through a journey of planning and execution excellence. Supply chain excellence – particularly in the pharmaceutical industry – was the topic of a presentation by Rod de Spong, chief financial officer of Douglas Pharma, New Zealand’s largest pharmaceutical company. De Spong examined how supply chain excellence and the SCOR model had accelerated his firm’s growth and profitability. Part of the African mix at this year’s conference was Douw Jooste, manager: supply chain enablement, Sasol Oil, South Africa who looked at the “Migration of Sasol Oil to a Supply Chain Organisation”. He noted that Sasol Oil had embarked on a business redesign to meet changing market conditions and customer needs. Substantial changes were implemented regarding process design, supply chain strategy and organisation design, as well as the increased use of appropriate technology. “The implementation process to date has introduced a number of changes but has also created a number of learnings useful for future similar projects,” Jooste noted.