By Johannes Kern
It looked like NASA’s Mission Control Center with its huge screens… While visiting the headquarters of a major Logistics Service Provider in Shanghai, we were guided through a control room, where staff could track numerous trucks across a huge city map.
After our group moved on, I passed this room again on my way back from the bathroom. Impressed by the futuristic looks and this approach to visibility in the supply chain, I wanted to take another look but found that the screens were switched off. So I asked an employee how often the monitors were in use and, a bit shy, she explained that this was only the case when they had visitors. Tracking cargo for hours on it, she said, was extremely exhausting.
That means that although it looked remarkable, the room was of no practical value beyond impressing visitors. I believe that this is a very common issue with some of the technologies that are currently discussed and implemented in pilot projects for supply chains across the world. Digital transformation in supply chain management is of course a crucial topic (Sullivan and Kern 2020), but what is possible is not necessarily what is useful.
If you ask practitioners how they understand supply chain visibility, you often hear that it is about tracking parts, components or products in transit from manufacturer to final destination, ideally in real time (Hanna 2022). However, as we can see at the Logistics Service Provider in Shanghai, in reality, people don’t want to see the flow of every shipment and don’t need to see every truck moving on a map. The real purpose of supply chain visibility is not to watch one of the world’s most boring TV shows on a giant screen, but rather to know early enough if there is a problem with the shipment. Information is not required in real time, but early enough that a logistics planner can react. In the event that a shipment gets damaged or lost during its voyage across the ocean, information about it must be passed on so that a replacement part can be ordered as soon as possible. As far as “business as usual” cases go, it is not necessary to “see things”, just to make sure the right cargo was picked up, is on its way, and will arrive when expected.
So before trying to implement technology, it’s imperative to understand what the customers’ main job is. What do they mean when they say “I need visibility”, or “I need feature ‘X’”?
In the Jobs to be done literature, frameworks for understanding the real pain points of your customers are provided (Christensen et al. 2016; Kalbach 2020). Goals are hierarchical and customers’ jobs can be viewed on four different levels. Goals at one level may be a stage for the next. These levels are:
• Aspirations: An ideal change of state, something the individual desires to become, e.g., stress-free work.
• Main Job: A broader objective, the real goal, e.g., make sure that the right product is delivered to the right destination, in the right quantity, in the right condition, at the right time.
• Little Job: A smaller job that corresponds roughly to stages in a big job, e.g., know the condition of everything with my cargo is OK.
• Micro-Job: Activities that resemble tasks, e.g., see the individual shipment.
By asking “why?” it is possible to move up in this jobs hierarchy, and by asking “how?” to move down. The key is to identify what is sometimes not so obvious, the main job, which is the centripetal force for making decisions and aligning to customer needs. Prior to deciding on a new technology, this must be the first step.
Digging Deeper:
Christensen, Clayton M.; Hall, Taddy; Dillon, Karen; Duncan, David S. (2016): Competing against luck. The story of innovation and customer choice. 1st. New York: HarperBusiness an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
Hanna, Katie Terrell: Supply Chain Visibility (SCV). Available online at https://www.techtarget.com/searcherp/definition/supply-chain-visibility-SCV, checked on 11/01/2022.
Kalbach, Jim (2020): The Jobs To Be Done Playbook: Align Your Markets, Organization, and Strategy Around Customer Needs: Rosenfeld Media.
Sullivan, Mac; Kern, Johannes (2020): Digitizing the logistics industry. Demystifying the impacts of the fourth industrial revolution / Mac Sullivan, Johannes Kern. 1st. Hoboken: Wiley-IEEE Press (IEEE Press series on technology management, innovation, and leadership).
About the author
Johannes Kern is a professor of Digital Business Management at DHBW (Baden-Württemberg Cooperative State University) in Lörrach, Germany. He researches, teaches, and consults in the area of Digital Business Models and Digital Transformation. Please contact him via LinkedIn or his Email.
