November Virtual PDM:  Thursday, November 17 @ 5:30pm AZ Time

Topic:  Supply Chain Management, where we’ve been, where we are, and where we are going.

Guest Speaker: Allen Jacques 

About the Presenter:

Allen Jacques

Allen is an Industry Thought Leader at Kinaxis. A veteran planning and operations leader, he has served as VP of Global Technical Operations & Biologics and External Manufacturing for Leo Pharma, VP of Network Supply Planning at Pfizer, VP of Pharma Supply Chain at FusionOps, as well as holding Director level roles at Baxter and Wyeth. He holds a BS in Microbiology from the University of Maryland and did graduate studies in Biochemistry at Johns Hopkins University.
  

About the Presentation:

I would like to step back and reflect on how supply chain management has evolved during my career. I started out when MRP II was the next big thing so that gives you an idea of how far back I go. The first supply chain I managed was in Europe for latex surgical and vinyl exam gloves. We were able to get monthly inventories from our 20 affiliates and as soon as that was in I would print them out. I would then spend my evening key punching the data into a spreadsheet which I then used to figure out distribution and manufacturing plans for our Malaysian and Belgian manufacturing sites. I became extremely good at Excel but the better I became the more concerned I was about using it as a planning tool.

Since those days supply chain management systems, visibility, and functionality has evolved into something that we could only dream of back then. But according to McKinsey Excel is still the most popular planning tool and 73% of planners still rely on it. We are far from leveraging the sophisticated processes and tools at our fingertips !