Each spring and fall, the Global Supply Chain Institute (GSCI) at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Haslam College of Business hosts the Supply Chain Forum with its corporate partners. The Fall 2024 Supply Chain Forum, held November 12-14, brought together faculty, students and industry leaders to explore current issues, learn about new supply chain developments and share novel approaches to industry issues.
Corporate Partner Perspective
The forum’s opening session featured Jen Kelly, vice president of planning for Schneider Electric (SE) in North America. A global powerhouse in electrification, digitization and automation, SE is at the forefront of innovating the planning process to improve supply chain performance. In 2023 and 2024, Gartner ranked it as the world’s leading supply chain organization.
Kelly kicked off her session with an overview of SE’s organization, operations and initiatives, as well as how the company is capitalizing on global megatrends. Kelly then announced that Time Magazine ranked SE as the world’s No. 1 most sustainable company. She credited the organization’s emphasis on its supply chain for the ranking.
“Over 50 percent of our employees work in our supply chain,” she said. “That’s very telling of the focus of our organization, the commitment it has and the value we place on our global supply chain.”
Capitalizing on Global Megatrends
The megatrends Kelly cited in her talk include climate change, the new global equilibrium, digital and artificial intelligence, energy transition and the evolution of wealth. She noted that SE can capitalize on each while benefiting other companies and consumers and contributing to overall sustainability. For example, she described SE as a leader in electrification, which many companies are turning to in order to decarbonize and reduce dependency on fossil fuels.
Kelly also discussed SE’s role in artificial intelligence. She observed that, “For one ChatGPT query, it takes 10 times more energy than a simple Google search,” exemplifying how the rapid growth of artificial intelligence creates an enormous need for more energy. SE’s response is to rapidly scale up its data center business that powers AI to support the massive demand.
According to Kelly, SE can capitalize on these trends to grow its business and create a more sustainable planet. The company is creating a tailored supply chain with its suppliers, manufacturing facilities and distribution centers to meet the needs of its customers and end users. SE is driving end-to-end connectivity and visibility for customers, suppliers and vendors using analyzed, organized and searchable data to achieve this goal.
To aid in meeting the growth opportunities spurred by the global megatrends, Kelly explained that SE is focused on autonomous planning with two major initiatives: automation/anticipation and standardization/adoption.
Automation and Anticipation
SE is pursuing autonomous planning for ease of use and scalability by applying automatic allocation, prioritization and redistribution of orders using self-healing planning parameters.
“We now have a machine that will tell us a safety stock target that should give us 95 percent on-time delivery,” Kelly said.
Kelly also explained that SE has what it calls “humans on the loop,” or supply planners looking at the machine’s output. These planners check the efficacy of the machine. If it puts out results that don’t make sense, the planners recode the data and feed the information back, so it gets smarter and provides a better result on the next cycle.
Standardization and Adoption
To implement automation and continuing as a leader in global megatrends, SE seeks people who are strong in data analytics, critical thinking and communication and possess a hunger for continuous improvement. “When I think about how to bring this to life, we need people, and that’s by driving standardization and adoption,” Kelly said
SE is also investing heavily in internal resources with the launch of its Planning Golden Rules, which will also drive standardization and adoption.
“It is a set of five very simple pillars focused on vendor management and accuracy, production plan attainment, planning parameters, inventory management and most importantly, how we’re servicing our customer,” Kelly explained. “Anyone coming to our plants can connect with the planning teams there and really try to understand their goal and purpose.”
Further, the organization rolled out a detailed playbook derived from the golden rules to help teams understand the critical activities needed to drive standardization and adoption of the best practices and tools SE is deploying.
“We’ve also put in place a supply chain expert for each plant, so that those plant members have someone that they can call. They can ask them questions, help them really make it part of their culture, so every day it becomes habitual,” Kelly said.
Improved Service Outcomes
All these initiatives have led to a 15 percent improvement in SE’s customer service level with on-time delivery, a 15 percent increase in its suppliers’ on-time delivery and a reduction of about 25 percent in open purchase orders.
“Not only are we servicing our customers better, but we’re becoming a much better customer to our suppliers, which is equally important when you think about that end-to-end planning because our suppliers are truly an extension of us,” she said.
Save the Date
The Spring 2025 Supply Chain Forum will be held April 10-12 at the Marriott Knoxville Downtown. The event is exclusive to over 80 organizations that partner with UT to learn, network and recruit the best supply chain talent. For more information about the forum or to learn more about becoming Supply Chain Forum Partner, contact the GSCI.
CONTACT:
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Scott McNutt, business writer/publicist, rmcnutt4@utk.edu
