You Need to Hack your Supply Chain - SERIOUSLY

First Principles Thinking is needed now

Hey, Procurement Legend, I’ve been super excited to make this post. We’ve also got a podcast of this post with similar themes that you should check out for our paid community members.

Once again, this is all paid community member content only, and our paid members of this World of Procurement community are all responsible for keeping the lights on, letting me spend time working on this, and allowing me to hire help to create this content.

This week, I'm super excited by what I'm about to talk about what you're reading because this is the launch day of “How to hack your supply chain” by Eloise Epstein.

Before you read this article, I’d suggest you click the link below and buy this book from Amazon (the only place you can get a copy). If you've not bought that already, I’d also recommend her first book #ad.

And I'm a massive fan of Eloise because she always talks about procurement, supply chain, contract management together. Elouise talks about all three areas, and she understands the importance of each of them.

When I talk to people in procurement, I often find that they can get quite siloed in their thought process, how they think about the world, and how they look at things; they neglect the supply chain element and the Contract Management Area.

Contract Management is often massively neglected.

And something that I've always prioritised is the need for these three areas. I was hired as a consultant several times because I could confidently explain how all three areas fit together and see the organisation's gaps and issues and how to fix them. It’s an obvious formula that feels like a secret, perhaps one I’ll shed some light on.

Hacking your Supply Chain

Eloise's most recent book, How To Hack your supply chain, sounds weird, right?

Like, why are we talking about hacking your supply chain?

What's the premise behind this?

What are the ideas here?

And, what I would distil this book into in maybe a short paragraph, but perhaps I'll go on a little bit too long here, is this.

Elouise is promoting a first principles way of thinking about supply chain, which means breaking everything that procurement, supply chain, and contract management.

This includes the current tech, its processes, its policies, and how it operates into its smallest component piece.

Only then can you truly understand why a thing, a task, an activity, or a way of working is done that way.

From there, you can analyse it, understand it, and start to figure out if this is the right approach for you and your organisation.

Are we building resilience?

Are we building in risk mitigations? Are we making our supply chain strong?

Or are we just doing the same stuff that’s always been done?

We need to embrace a culture of digital, increase our algorithmic and data literacy, and adopt a hacking mindset. In this context, hacking is looking critically at our systems (technical and process), tearing them down to their core component pieces, and reassembling them to meet the ever-evolving risk environment.

But what does digital-first mean?