Who leads the supply chain?
Some manufacturers and retailers have started using the title “chief supply chain officer” to describe this position, although its usage is currently far less common even than CPO (as a rough and ready measure, a quick search on Google yields less than 20,000 hits for “chief supply chain officer” against over 300,000 for “chief procurement officer”, which has seen a tenfold increase in less than 12 months). But whatever title companies choose, it’s likely to be a senior leadership position reporting into a main board director. Which raises the question: who is best placed to fill this sort of role? Again, there is no universal answer, although the consensus among logistics and procurement folk can neatly be summed up as “anyone, as long as they aren’t from manufacturing”! “Manufacturing people tend to be doers rather than thinkers,” says Tim Carroll, vice-president of worldwide supply chain operations at IBM, who spent a number of years in the function. “They are interested in the effi
