Identifying Key Activities and Stakeholders
Identifying and communicating with key stakeholders is important for the success of any supply chain improvement initiative. In large and complex organizations, supply chain analyses can be fraught with challenges, including buy-in and participation from key stakeholders. Compared to more local or narrowly defined management efforts, enterprise-wide supply chain initiatives are more likely to involve varying groups of stakeholders with disparate perspectives and a broad range of interests. Neglecting to engage key stakeholders early and often - and with genuine intent to address their unique needs and concerns - is one of the most common points of failures of such initiatives.
Strategic Issues in Identifying Key Activities and Stakeholders
Identifying and communicating with key stakeholders is important for the success of any supply chain improvement initiative(1). In general, there are three important principles that should be followed.
1. Get to know your stakeholders
The key idea here is to develop a comprehensive understanding of who your stakeholders are, what they care about, and how they relate to the initiative that you are trying to launch. It is useful to view the stakeholder map from multiple dimensions: both internal and external to the organization.
Internal Stakeholders: Across an organization, there are likely to many stakeholders whose roles relate to the planned program in different ways. Each 'functional' stakeholder represents a different perspective and a different type of expertise. A program's ability to identify key functional stakeholders and to recruit their participation depends largely on the type of commodity involved.
External Stakeholders: Suppliers and customers contribute a valuable market perspective to the supply chain management process, usually well in advance of any actual procurement or delivery. Similarly, funding organizations and regulatory bodies may have a significant impact on the program.
2. Engage as early as possible and listen to their concerns:
Engaging stakeholders as early as possible and listening to their concerns achieves three major objectives:
- It gives key stakeholders a sense of involvement in the process and lets them know their expertise and opinions are valued.
- It begins to educate stakeholders about the potential benefits of strategic planning and why these particular goods and services are being considered.
- It allows the team to gain additional, potentially valuable information and insight that may (or may not) support the findings compiled through data alone.
Stakeholders concerns can be incorporated both through face to face meetings with each individual stakeholder as well as through survey questionnaires. Questionnaires are generally tiered at multiple levels, ranging from questions on the stakeholder's specific role and function to questions on the perceived fit of different stakeholders with the overall program objective.
3. Communicate with your stakeholders
In any major supply chain management program, regular communications help to ensure that stakeholders are aware of the program's existence and basic purpose, goals and benefits as well as how it might affect their internal working procedures. Communications are generally related to awareness of the program, performance of the program, change management initiatives and knowledge transfer communications.
In the final stages, communications also involve proposing final recommendations and incorporating the feedback on the same. Most times, these could lead up to policy changes once a buy in from all stakeholders has been secured on the recommendations of the supply chain management program. Implementing the new recommendations and policy changes would require developing cross functional teams and setting up milestones for making the required changes. These would need to be communicated to all the stakeholders to ensure that there is no confusion on how the new policy changes would affect their role within and outside the organization.
RUTF Case Study: Supply Chain Key Activities
(1) “The 6 Principles of Stakeholder Engagement” by Raj Sharma , Supply Chain Management Review, Oct 01, 2008
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