Association for Supply Chain Management

4 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE VOLUME 10, ISSUE 9 and IBM in the 1950s and ’60s, provided an opportunity for a recognition of the role and responsibility that supply chain professionals or operations management professionals had. The focus was on establishing a body of knowledge. Secondly came a recognition of what ops managers did, regarding the supply chains within their organizations. It’s just that it took more than half a century for such matters to be properly appreciated, as Eshkenazi notes. “Unfortunately,” he adds, “it took a pandemic for people to really understand it. Dialing the clock back, the mission was focused on the individual: developing confident and capable employees that can understand what the production schedules are and what inventory requirements are. “We, as an organization, embrace not only the individual and prepare them through our certifications, competency, content, education, and professional development focus,” he continues, “but also the corporation, ensuring that they’re recognizing the individuals and rewarding them for the contributions they make; and more importantly, ensuring that they have individuals understand the role that supply chains play within their organizations. We embrace that responsibility that we can represent the individual, but we also need to make sure we represent the organization and ensure that companies can develop sustainable supply chains.” The focus there, as Eshkenazi points out, is on ethical, economic, and environmentally sustainable business practices for the ASCM. This was accomplished through mergers with other supply chain councils, thus forming a focus on the company. “We realized that our responsibility was first to the individual, preparing them and ensuring that they are competent and capable,” he says, “and I think we need to understand that prior to 2000, there were only about a dozen schools in the world that had a supply chain academic be ordered via the Internet these days. The logistics are a significant part of that system, says Eshkenazi. Unfortunately, warehousing and logistics are where most disruptions now occur. COVID-related demand shifts have occurred. This has resulted in what he calls a bullwhip effect with excess inventories, and systems have yet to be re-balanced between supply and demand. Worse, data indicators are often unreliable, causing much stress for companies and consumers alike. Supply chain routes “It’s a very interesting journey,” Eshkenazi observes, explaining the ASCM’s origins and a scholarly study, completed in the 1950s, calling for greater recognition by consumers of the supply chains that served them, adding, “I think we need to note that the term ‘supply chain’ didn’t really come into our vernacular until the mid-’90’s. Most of it was operations management and industrial design. You had a variety of different terms for it that really did not adequately represent the true supply chain.” He continues that the advent of computer technology, beginning with its earliest stages