Preface: What you have been told about a career in Supply

Chain is wrong.

If you are reading this book you are either a supply chain student,
a junior supply chain (or logistics/ warehouse/ transport)
professional or even a mid-manager who is stuck in a career that
should be moving faster. Like me a few years ago you too might
be struggling to find the right path for a better salary, a
promotion and a career plan that allows you to become a fulfilled
professional with a good work-life balance. In your quest for the
one secret to level up your career you probably have gone
through one or more of these:

• Constantly searching on the internet for the latest course

or qualifications in supply chain management, you might
have even enrolled a few just to realise that online
courses are only about common knowledge that you
already have.

• Endless browsing for the new job opening and subscribe

to email alerts with recruiters with the only result of
having your mailbox flooded with the same job alerts,
most of which are not relevant to your profile and for
which you do not even apply to anyway.

• Spending time on LinkedIn hoping to impress a recruiter

that promised to make you land your perfect job.
If any (or all) of the above apply to you welcome to the club of
the career dreamers. I have been there for almost 10 years and I
know what it’s like to get constantly distracted by the noise
around career development and chase new opportunities.

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THE PROBLEM WITH CONVENTIONAL CAREER DEVELOPMENT
KNOWLEDGE

There is one fundamental problem with common career

development approach: it is designed around external elements
of career progression that are of secondary importance compared
to other, more important elements: The internal elements of
career progression. These internal elements are not affected by
you completing courses or obtaining diplomas.
Your career progression is likely being slowed down and
weakened by these behaviours:

• Accumulation of general knowledge.

• Collecting widely available qualifications.
• Career hopping.
• Incorrect use of social media.

The truth about a fast career progression in supply chain

management is this: A successful career in Supply Chain
management depends on three main elements:

1. Ability to lead people outside your team

2. Ability to identify and remove bottlenecks
3. Ability to use technology

There is one single characteristic that differentiates internal from

external elements of career progression. This characteristic is the
most important driver of a career change, salary and promotion
path in Supply Chain management:

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 YOU MUST HAVE TOTAL CONTROL OF
THE ELEMENTS THAT DRIVE YOUR
CAREER FORWARD

EXTERNAL ELEMENTS OF CAREER PROGRESSION THAT YOU

CANNOT CONTROL

I know what you are thinking now: “I have control over my

studies and qualifications too, where is the difference?”
The difference is about how the job market, your company or
your manager value the external elements regardless of the effort
you put into your studies; here’s how it works:
Let’s take a professional qualification that is a global standard in
Supply Chain management. You enrol the course, study hard and
pass the exams. Then you and your diploma show up to your
manager or your company’s HR to discuss your career options.
You might expect your manager to be impressed and value your
new qualification as well as the effort you put into studying but
the reality is different:
Your manager will check your qualifications and the institute that
issued it and, as it happens with 99% of all professional
qualifications, it turns out that your diploma can be obtained with
a few weeks of part-time study, there are plenty of eBooks and
free material online to support students and, in some cases (a lot
more than you imagine) similar diplomas can be obtained in the
black market.

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Suddenly you realise that the value of your qualification is
something you have no control on and that regardless of your
effort, the weeks of studying may not help with your career plan.
Diplomas in Supply Chain management are commodities unlike
regulated professions like Medicine, Law or Finance. Supply Chain
qualifications are widely available from many institutes – some
with questionable standards – that their value is volatile.
Other external elements that can influence your career, but you
cannot control are:

• The relevancy of your university degree

• The job markets
• Industry trends
• Skills shortages
• Salaries trends

All the above is going to marginally influence your career path,

and that’s something you must accept and let go because:
1. No matter how hard you try, you cannot influence the job
market or changes in the industry.
2. Like you, all Supply Chain professionals with a career plan
are equally affected by those external elements,
therefore, it’s irrelevant.
This is what I discovered in 2014 when I met my mentor who
helped me made the first step that changed my career forever.
This book is about that journey and how you can use what I
learned to achieve the same results: Better salary, a fast
promotion path and become a valuable professional who is
headhunted by the best companies.

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CHAPTER 1: How I went from being a warehouse worker to supply
chain director in less than 6 years without spending a single penny
on courses.

“Is it time to go home yet?” joked a colleague while we were

walking to collect the assigned RF barcode scanners. It was 6:30
am and our shift in the chilled warehouse was about to begin.
I got that job 2 months after moving to the UK from Italy soon
after closing my small courier company where, with my father
and a few seasonal helpers, we used to deliver goods from
wholesalers to local grocery shops and restaurants between
Rome and the coast south of Venice. After a few years of cash
flow mismanagement, the company collapsed and I had no
option but to close, sell the assets and start again. So, I moved to
the UK and started applying for a job.
I wanted a management role, after all, I had the experience and I
was qualified but no recruiter would consider my CV, one young
man working from a recruiting agency once told me why: “There
is no way I can check your expertise in Supply Chain
management. Your diplomas tell me that you have studied hard,
but knowledge does not equate to expertise and you are not a
recent graduate.” An entry-level job in a warehouse was all I
could get.
Making jokes about the job was common but the topic of the
jokes was self-explanatory: “Is it time to go home yet?” meant we
hated being there, walking in line to get our scanners anticipated
an 8-hours shift in a chilled warehouse picking goods for a giant
UK supermarket. The job was simple: picking goods using an RF
scanner, a sort of micro-computer connected to a central server
as fast and accurately as possible. With only a 30-minute break
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per shift, pickers would have to be very fast and not make any
mistake if they wanted to keep their job. An unplanned visit to
the loo meant your numbers would go down.
Because the job was hard the turnover rate was very high. More
than 50% of new hires would quit after 1 month. 50% more
would leave in 3 months and less than 5% would make it through
a full year. Career opportunities, therefore, were plenty and I
wanted to capitalise on that.
The first opportunity to progress from a warehouse picker role
was when a night shift supervisor role became available. Only, I
did not want to be on the night shift, and I did not want a
supervisor role, I wanted a management role in the Supply Chain
so I went on the company’s website to find job openings and I
applied for a more senior role in a different department. To my
surprise, the HR lady told me exactly what I was told months
before from the young man of the recruiting agency: “There is no
way I can check your expertise in Supply Chain management. Your
diplomas tell me that you have studied hard, but all I have on my
records is that you are doing a good job as a picker. Why don’t
you apply for a supervisor role?”

THE VALUE OF PROFESSIONAL QUALIFICATIONS

IN SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT IS VOLATILE
BECAUSE THERE IS TOO MUCH OFFER

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Chapter 2: The mindset trap of professional qualifications.

The problem with my job search was that I was expecting

recruiters to give my professional qualifications more value and
relevance than what they had. As I mentioned in the intro,
diplomas in Supply Chain Management are a commodity: They
are widely available from a multitude of professional bodies,
Universities and schools so having one is not going to make much
difference in your career.
Most Supply Chain professionals see qualifications as a gateway
to career success, but here is the truth: If you believe that the
reason why your career is stuck is that you lack a diploma you are
subconsciously lying to yourself into believing that you are not
responsible for your career success. And this belief is the number
one reason why your career is stuck.
Take a moment to see if you have even had one of those
thoughts:

• “If I had studied at that University instead of this one, I

would have gotten a higher salary”
• “I need to study and get a diploma in [INSERT SUBJECT]
before I can get a promotion”
• “If I qualified from [INSERT PROFESSIONAL BODY/
SCHOOL] I could get a better role

I hope you are beginning to see the problem with such beliefs:
You are shifting the responsibility of your career success to some
sort of external element on which you have no control on and
you are not taking accountability for your success as a Supply
Chain professional. The truth is simple: Successful professionals
thrive regardless of their qualifications, they do so by constantly
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deliver results at work with their actions, they let results - not
titles – be proof of their professionalism and they excel in the
three pillars of Supply Chai excellence mentioned before:
1. They can lead people outside their team
2. They are masters in identifying and removing bottlenecks
3. They are experts in supply chain technology

One clarification here is required: I am not advocating against

studying. Leaders are readers and professionals cannot achieve
an outstanding degree of success if they don’t keep learning. The
argument, therefore, is not whether you should or should not
study, of course, you should, but the certificate itself is not proof
of your knowledge in Supply Chain management.

A PROFESSIONAL CERTIFICATION IS NOT

PROOF OF YOUR KNOWLEDGE AND
EXPERTISE. YOUR ABILITY TO
CONSISTENTLY DELIVER RESULTS AT
WORK IS.

It took me years to see the fine line between applied knowledge

and acquired knowledge. Applied knowledge is things we learn in
classes, from books or from other colleagues/ managers that we
apply in a professional environment to create results. Acquired
knowledge is only potential and a paper certificate is not going to
turn acquired knowledge into applied knowledge. Managers
don’t promote staff nor companies give pay rises depending on
acquired knowledge.

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There is a way to escape the professional qualifications rat race
and start learning subjects that will help up-level your career:
1. Start learning only what you can apply at work from
tomorrow:
Are you a warehouse admin? Learn advanced Excel features or
master the ERP in use in your organization then apply what you
have learned to increase your productivity.
Are you a planner? Learn advanced statistical models and apply
what you have learned to generate more accurate forecasts. A
course in procurement or an MBA is not going to help you as you
cannot apply what you learn from day one.
2. Forget the diploma and study for free:
Most online courses offer free or reduced rates if you study but
don’t give the exam. It’s is a great way to save money and to shift
your mindset away from the piece of paper and towards the
knowledge you can apply now.
3. Focus on the next small step ahead.
Your career plan is made of small steps. Course providers would
like you to think that your dream job is just one course away, that
one certificate will open the doors of the perfect career path and
that if you give them money, your future will be bright and full of
wonderful opportunities. Don’t fall on that trap, there are
countless brilliant professionals without professional
qualifications that are exceptional in their job, you can be one of
them if you get enough applied knowledge.

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Chapter 3: What it takes to achieve a brilliant career in Supply
Chain management.

After failing to be selected for that Supply Chain role and getting
rejected on 4 more applications over 2 months I decided to follow
the advice of the HR lady and I applied for a supervisor role.
The pay rise was less than 5% and the job was a lot harder than I
thought. I was responsible for a team of 12 pickers, most of them
with almost no experience and I was accountable for their
performance, no books or online course could have taught me
how to make my team perform. I got the role because I was a
good picker but picking fast and accurately is one thing, making a
team of pickers to pick accurately and fast is a completely
different one. I soon understood the first big lesson of career
progression: -

WE DON’T GET TO PROGRESS IN A

BETTER ROLE BECAUSE OF A REWARD
FOR THE JOB WELL DONE IN THE PAST;
WE PROGRESS WHEN WE CAN BE
TRUSTED TO DRIVE VALUE IN A MORE
CHALLENGING ENVIRONMENT.

Any new role – from a career progression perspective – requires

the development of a new set of skills and new deliverables that
we did not necessarily possess before; therefore, a successful
career plan is based on small linear steps, moving effectively from
one role to the next one where the next carries additional
responsibility, more complexity and requires the application of
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more advanced skills and knowledge of the role before while still
operating in the same scope.
When professionals are promoted to the next role in line with
their previous one, they can leverage previous expertise, leverage
hand-on experience developed in the past, benefit from a
previously developed network. And these are all the things I used
to succeed in my role as a supervisor.
I started by teaching my team how to improve speed by showing
how I used to do it, I would often reach out to other supervisors –
mostly ex pickers like me who got promoted – for advice and got
lots of actionable tools. Consistency and focus did the rest.
From that supervisor role I got an admin role, then a
management role, and so on until in 2018 I funded my Supply
Chain consulting practice. I had – and still don’t have- any
qualifications in Supply Chain management from any professional
body although I worked with many professionals who hold one. In
the next chapters, I will show you how you can do the same and
take your career to the next level fast.

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SECRET 1 THE SERVANT LEADER

Chapter 4: Traditional leadership style is dying a slow and painful

death.

Experts in leadership and executive coaches often categorize

leadership in 5 main styles. None of these is suitable for a
successful career in Supply Chain management, here is why:
1. Authoritarian Leadership.
Authoritarian leadership is when a leader imposes expectations
and define outcomes and it is mostly used when team members
need clear guidelines. This kind of leadership works when the
leader in the direct manager of a team of unskilled workers. For a
successful career in Supply Chain Management, you cannot be an
authoritative leader as you must learn to lead teams of
professional who do not directly report to you: Sales and Finance
teams but also suppliers and customers need guidance and
leadership from Supply Chain leaders and authoritative leaders
can burn bridges and spoil relations with teams they do not
manage directly
2. Participative Leadership.
Participative leadership are based on the democratic theory
where team members are involved in the decision-making
process and it is useful where team members must feel engaged
and motivated to contribute. This style might work for mid-
management Supply Chain professionals but, with unskilled team
members covering admin or operational roles, a democratic style
is at risk of creating an environment where the majority might
end up taking wrong decisions. Therefore, Supply Chain leaders
must avoid become Participative leaders.
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 3. Delegative Leadership.
Also known as "laissez-faire leadership", a delegative leadership
style focuses on delegating initiative to team members. This can
be a successful strategy if team members are competent to
prefer engaging in individual work. Supply Chain professionals
should avoid this leadership style as disagreements among the
members may split and divide a group, leading to poor
motivation and low morale.
4. Transactional Leadership.
Transactional leadership styles use "transactions" between the
leader and the teams through rewards and other exchanges to
get the job done. The leader sets the goals and team members
know how they'll be rewarded for their compliance. This giving
and taking leadership style is more concerned with following
established routines and procedures than with making any
transformational changes to an organization. Supply Chain
professionals must avoid becoming transactional leaders or they
will end up with establishing a status quo where change and
innovation are discouraged.
5. Transformational Leadership.
In transformational leadership styles, the leader inspires teams
with a vision and then encourages and empowers them to
achieve it. This style is beneficial when a change must be
introduced like new software or a company merge. Although
Supply Chain professionals must know how to lead change, this
approach is not suitable for a long-term career.

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 THE BEST LEADERSHIP STYLE FOR A
CAREER IN SUPPLY CHAIN
MANAGEMENT IS THE SERVANT LEADER

A Servant Leader shares power, puts the needs of teams first –

both internal and external teams - and helps people develop and
perform as highly as possible. Servant leadership inverts the norm
where the success of the leader and team are the main priority.
Instead of the team working to serve the leader, the leader exists
to serve the team.
Exceptional achievers in Supply Chain management are servant
leaders:

• They don’t command suppliers to deliver on time, they

help them do it
• They don’t expect planners to match demand accurately,
they teach them how to.
• They don’t complain about hauliers missing deadlines,
they help them improve

When we think of exceptional achievers in Supply Chain, we think

of leaders whose purpose is to make teams in the company
ecosystem perform through support, coaching and training,
setting the vision and goals for what good looks like regardless of
their status.

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 SERVANT LEADERS EXIST TO HELP
PEOPLE DELIVER RESULTS REGARDLESS
OF THEIR GAINS

Chapter 5: The 5 traits of a servant leader and why being one will
skyrocket your Supply Chain career.

In their academic paper Identifying Primary Characteristics of

Servant Leadership, researchers Adam Focht and Michael Ponton
share the results of a Delphi study they conducted with scholars
in the field of servant leadership.
A total of twelve characteristics were identified, five of which
were agreed upon by all the scholars polled. These five most
prominent servant leadership characteristics were:
1. Valuing People. Servant leaders value people for who
they are, not just for what they give to the organization.
Servant leaders are committed first and foremost to
teams rather than the company board.
2. Humility. Servant leaders do not promote themselves;
they put other people first they know that getting results
is not all about them and that results are accomplished
through team efforts.
3. Listening. Servant leaders listen to receptively and
nonjudgmentally. They are willing to listen because they
are eager to learn from other professionals and to
understand the people they serve. Servant leaders seek
first to understand, and then to be understood. This
discernment enables the servant leader to know when
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 their service is needed or when they need to step back
and let teams take charge.
4. Trust. Servant leaders give trust to others. They willingly
take this risk for the people they serve.
5. Caring. Servant leaders have people and purpose in their
heart. They display kindness and concern for others.
Now I want you to ask yourself his question: Can you name one
person you ever met who can be described as a servant leader? If
the answer is yes, this person is probably an exceptional achiever,
a role model and a professional every organization would love to
work with.
Becoming a servant leader is no easy task, it requires a lot of work
and patience; there is only one reason why you might not like the
idea of becoming a servant leader: You think that helping others
at work is a waste of time and you would rather spend that time
to focus on your career; here’s the point: There is no way you can
achieve anything that matters, professionally or personally if you
are not interested in other people’s success. Stories about lone
players that use people to climb up the career ladder work in
films (or in investment banking maybe) but not in real life.
Certainly not in Supply Chain management where so many teams,
departments, suppliers, customers and other players within or
without your company or organization.
If you are still not sure about becoming a servant leader to level
up your career you might need to rethink your plan because
Supply Chain leaders are servant leaders.

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SECRET 2 DESIGN AND EXECUTE LEAN WORKFLOWS

Chapter 6: Companies love problem solvers. Become one to move

your career further.

When there is a problem at work that you cannot solve, who do

you go to? Whenever you need to take an important decision and
you need advice, who do you reach? When you realise that the
processes under which you operate should and could be made
better, who do you expect to take initiative for such change? In
this chapter, we will learn that if you want to achieve outstanding
results in your Supply Chain management career, you must
become that person.
If the answer to one or more of those questions is your manager,
congratulations, you are a luck professional working under a good
manager. If not, and that person is a colleague, chances are your
company’s Supply Chain is not running smoothly.
One of the most important traits of a great career in Supply Chain
management is the ability to solve complex problems and remove
bottlenecks. There is a reason why business process improvement
methodologies are almost always mastered by Supply Chain
experts. Because it is in Supply Chain where process
improvement is critical and where, if well done can return most
benefits. Think about it, how many Sales or Marketing executives
are interested in Lean, Six Sigma or Total Quality frameworks?
Very few and not because there is no need for smooth business
processes in sales or marketing, but because the benefit of lean
processes in those departments are not comparable to the
savings that a Supply Chain manager can achieve when applying
such methodologies to purchase and planning, production,
logistics or warehousing.
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Supply Chain executives are also designers of lean processes, not
just fixers. As a designer you gain access to high-paying jobs that
are in great demand when:

• Companies merge and need to redesign their Supply

Chain.
• A new product range is introduced in the market and the
business requires a new Supply Chain strategy
• The business wants to expand operations in new
countries.
• The business is on a transformation path to becoming
more sustainable.

Those are only a few examples of events that trigger the need of
designers of lean Supply Chain. Such professionals are a rare asset
and shortage of talents always drives salaries up.
Exceptional Supply Chain executives can solve problems, they like
to be engaged in simplifying complex operations and thrive to
continuously improve efficiency and remove bottlenecks for the
benefit of the entire organization including suppliers and
customers. If you are committed to becoming one of these rare
professionals, you must learn how to systematically solve
problems and design lean workflows.

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Chapter 7: How To Become A Process Designer Expert

Lean thinking is not about Lean as in Toyota Manufacturing, nor

am I suggesting you get qualified as a Six Sigma Black Belt. You
can become the go-to professional in your company for when
things go wrong, the expert who can give advice and the one who
takes the initiative to drive efficiency across the organization with
a simple process: the DMAIC.
DMAIC is an abbreviation of the five improvement steps it
comprises: Define, Measure, Analyse, Improve and Control and it
refers to a data-driven improvement cycle used for improving,
optimizing and stabilizing business processes and designs. The
DMAIC improvement cycle is the core tool used to drive Six Sigma
projects. However, DMAIC is not exclusive to Six Sigma and can
be used as the framework for other improvement applications All
the DMAIC process steps are required and always proceed in the
given order.
1. Define
The purpose of this step is to identify the problem, goal,
resources, scope and high-level project timeline. This information
is typically captured within a project document but, for small
improvements, a formal document is not always necessary. You
can use a one-page DMAIC document where each step is made of
just a few lines. It is important not to be formulaic about this
process but to use it as a planning framework to drive effective
improvements. Write down what you currently know. Seek to
clarify facts, set objectives and identify who is affected and/ or
will benefit from the solution. At this stage you must define the
following:

• The problem
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 • The people affected

• Their pains, how they expect things to be in an ideal

scenario, and how they measure success (what good looks
like for them, what are the critical process/ solution
outputs?
2. Measure
The purpose is to measure the specification of the problem/goal.
This is a data collection step, the purpose of which is to establish
performance baselines. Here it is critical not to give for granted
what the team affected is asking/complaining about. As a leader,
you must be able to identify the measures of the problems
correctly and to avoid bias, an example could be the despatch
team complaining about orders coming in late. The performance
metric baseline from the Measure phase will be compared to the
performance metric after the project to determine objectively
whether significant improvement has been made.
3. Analyse
The purpose of this step is to identify, validate and select root
cause for elimination. Many potential root causes of the project/
problem are identified via root cause analysis. The top 3-4
potential root causes are selected using multi-voting or other
consensus tools for further validation. A data collection plan is
created, and data are collected to establish the relative
contribution of each root causes to the project metric. This
process is repeated until a valid root cause can be identified.
4. Improve

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The purpose of this step is to identify, test and implement a
solution to the problem. Identify creative solutions to eliminate
the key root causes to fix and prevent process problems.
5. Control
The purpose of this step is to embed the changes and ensure
sustainability, this is sometimes referred to as making the change
'stick'. A Control chart can be useful during the Control stage to
assess the stability of the improvements over time by serving
both as a guide to continue monitoring the process and provide a
plan for each of the measures being monitored in case the
process becomes unstable.

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SECRET 3 MASTER DIGITAL SUPPLY CHAINS

Chapter 8: Supply Chain professional who can master technology

earn better salaries.

Servant leadership followed by the ability to solve problems and

drive contingent and continuous improvement, if you can master
the first two pillars of a successful Supply Chain career are already
ahead of the competition and on track for your nest promotion.
There is a third element though that if mastered correctly, can
make a huge difference in terms of salary and promotion path,
not to mention the increased opportunities of being headhunted
by the best companies. You can master Supply Chain digital tools.
Data from Glassdoor confirms that Supply Chain professionals
skilled in any of that software earn on average 15% more
compared with similar profiles with low digital skills. The most
requested are:

• SAP HANA
• Oracle Enterprise Resource Planning
• Microsoft Dynamics 365
• Data analytics tools – PowerBI, Tableau, Phyton
• RF scanning/ barcoding
• Robotic Process Automation (RPA)

Here is the truth behind the technology: Supply Chain has been
subject to massive transformation thanks to technology.
Digitalisation and automation are strategic elements of any well-
designed Supply Chain even for small and medium enterprises.

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 SUPPLY CHAIN PROFESSIONALS WHO
CAN’T OR DON’T WANT TO BECOME
TECHNOLOGY EXPERTS ARE GOING TO
BECOME OBSOLETE.

Traditional Supply Chain roles now require users to master digital

tools and Excel alone is not enough.
The common objection to this argument – that I hear often in my
consulting work – is that Supply Chain executives should be
supported by an IT team and it’s the IT team job to own business
technology. This is a false objection that hides a much deeper
problem: Most Supply Chain professionals are technophobes;
they don’t take the time to learn new technology because this
evolves continuously and keeping up with the evolution of
enterprise software means to keep learning. Hiding behind their
huge spreadsheets, most Supply Chain professionals are still
working like it was 1998.
Still not convinced? Find a good Supply Chain blog or podcast and
check what Supply Chain leaders talk about. They talk about
digitalization, Blockchain and cloud analytics, they are not
software engineers, they are Supply Chain experts. If you want
your career to move forward you must learn about the
technology that is changing Supply Chain.

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Chapter 9: The 3 main Supply Chain software you must know to
fast track your career.

Most Supply Chain software is based around three main types of

technology. Knowing these three tools will make you learn almost every
software fast without the need to learn to code or being an IT expert. I
use this method too and it allowed me to become an advanced user of
SAP and Microsoft Dynamics just to name two of the most used
enterprise software.

1. Relational Databases

A relational database is a collection of data with pre-defined

relationships between them like customers and sales orders. These
items are organized as a set of tables with columns and rows where
columns define the data type, like the customer name, order date and
delivery postcode in a list of sales orders, and rows identify the sales
orders. Tables are used to hold information about the objects to be
represented in the database so in our example one table holds data
about the customer like address and contact details, and another table
holds data of the sales order like delivery date and amount. Each
column in a table holds a certain kind of data and a field stores the
actual value of an attribute like the order date field of our Sales Order.
The rows in the table represent a collection of related values of one
object or entity. Each row in a table could be marked with a unique
identifier called a primary key, and rows among multiple tables can be
made related using foreign keys. In our example, the sales order
number is the primary key of the sales order table and the customer
number is a foreign key that links to the customer table where the
customer number is the primary key.

Relational databases are the architectural frame of every ERP, MRP or

WMS and understanding the framework allows you to master any of
those systems fast.

2. Data Analytics
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Data analytics is the science of analysing raw data to generate insights
and make better decisions. The process involved in data analysis
involves several different steps:

• The first step is to determine the data requirements or how the

data is grouped. Data may be separated by single dimensions (
the columns of our relational database) like SKU, Region or
timeframe.

• The second step is the process of collecting data. This can be

done through a variety of techniques like reports and queries or
even surveys. It is critical to understand that the collection
phase should involve the least number of possible steps
because at each step the risk of data corruption increases.

• Once the data is collected, it must be organized so it can be

analysed. Data may be organized on a spreadsheet or other
form of software that can take statistical data. Although
spreadsheets are the standard in basic data analysis, I
encourage you to look at more reliable and advanced tools if
you want to stand out from the 99% of Supply Chain
professionals and go for tools like PowerBI, Tableau, Phyton
and SQL data analysis.

• The data is then cleaned up before analysis. This means it is

scrubbed and checked to ensure there is no duplication or
error, and that it is not incomplete. This step helps correct any
errors before it goes on to a data analyst to be analysed.

3. Blockchain

A blockchain is, in the simplest of terms, a time-stamped series of

immutable records – or Blocks - of data that is managed by a cluster of
computers – the Chain - not owned by any single entity. Each of these
blocks of data is secured and bound to each other using cryptographic
principles. So, what is so special about it and why is everybody so
excited about this disruptive technology in Supply Chain? Because it
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cannot be tempered. The blockchain is a simple yet ingenious way of
passing information from A to B in a safe manner. One part of the
transaction initiates the process by creating a block for example by
issuing a purchase order. This block is verified by thousands, perhaps
millions of computers distributed around the net. The verified block is
added to a chain, which is stored across the net, creating not just a
unique record, but a unique record with a unique history. Falsifying a
single record like changing the purchasing price in the order once this is
received would require falsifying the entire chain in millions of
instances at the same time.

A UK company has recently created a blockchain tool for food

companies and can ensure that fish sold in Sushi restaurants in Japan
have been sustainably harvested by its suppliers in Indonesia.

Supply Chains technology that uses blockchain can guarantee

unprecedented levels of traceability, anti-laundering and comply with
anti-slavery requirements.

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Chapter 10: The hard truth about a career in Supply Chain
management.

I want to close this small book on a good note but also with a warning:
Like you, many are trying to successfully climb the career ladder. They
have similar ambitions and similar goals, they might be experienced,
skilled and trustworthy professionals just like you. Yet, only a few will
make it to the top. That is the hard truth of career progression: it takes
hard work, passion and effort to become a skilled professional who can
earn a higher-than-average salary, get promoted fast and become a
high-achiever.

Most companies out there would like you to believe that the right job
for you is only a matter of cracking the code of the perfect interview,
having a perfect CV or the right picture on your LinkedIn profile. I have
been there, and I can tell you that your career does not depend on that.

Your career in Supply Chain management depends on the results you

bring consistently, your ability to lead, to level up your game, solve
tougher problems and being up to date with the latest technology. I
hope you can use the content of this book to become the professional
you would love to work with and have a successful and rewarding
career.

With Passion.

Alfredo Iorio

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