If you have observed an increased difficulty finding strong talent to fill your Supply Chain openings, you are observing the leading edge of an inevitable shift in candidate availability, according to Mark Trowbridge, C.P.M., of Strategic Procurement Solutions. An increased number of jobs are going unfilled and those candidates who are hired are beginning to draw premium salaries, performance bonuses and hiring bonuses. This phenomenon is being driven by two major factors in the economy:

Factor #1 - The U.S. economy continues to do very well right now, and unemployment is at a near alltime low, at just 4.4% (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics - October 2006). What this means is that there are currently several thousand fewer candidates available for the new supply chain job openings in the marketplace.

Factor #2 - The "Boomer" generation is now leaving the workplace. This means that fewer workers are coming in as a larger portion of the professional workforce exits. An excellent article in "Inside Supply Management" titled Avoiding the Labor Shortage says "More than 25% of the working population will reach retirement age by 2010, resulting in a potential shortage of nearly 10 Million workers."

The same article predicts, "One fifth of this country's large, established companies will be losing 40% of their top-level talent during the next five years. During the same period, the replacement pool of 35 to 44 year-olds will decline by 15%."

If you do nothing: With no recognition of the problem and no adjustment in your staffing sources and practices, you may find you are hiring a lower grade of employee from a pool of poorer quality candidates. Or, you may find yourself hiring less experienced individuals who require more training and hand-holding than you can afford to give.

Recognize that a slight decline in attention to supply chain disciplines results in production planning inaccuracies, inventory increases, service level declines and a disproportionate increase in supply chain costs. We are already seeing out-of-control conditions showing up in isolated companies that have previously been recognized for running tight ships.

So how can today's Managers and Directors find and retain quality supply chain staffing? Just as you would expect from our capitalistic and entrepreneurial business culture, there are answers to some of these problems being developed, and being effectively utilized only by some. The problem is, as with most transitions of sea-change proportions, many organizations will adhere to outmoded practices by saying, "But we have always done it this way."

Organizations that are going to survive and thrive will be organization which can rapidly adjust to peaks in workload and project complexity. They will likely find methods to optimally staff a supply management organization with the following types of employees:

1. Supply Chain Personnel - A sufficient number of qualified staff members should be hired and trained, to be able to conduct ongoing sourcing and management of at least 80% of the organization's supply chain operations.
   
   
2. Temporary Staffing - For peak workload periods and to handle projects requiring additional staff depth, leading firms are identifying pools of temporary talent that can work for 1 to 6 months at a time. Alert managers maintain a personal network of well qualified potential contractors and temporary staffing services that have an inventory of trained supply chain professionals. All the while you must realize that temporary agencies will actually feel the depleting pinch on trained talent first.
   
   
3. Third Party Outsourcing - Functions that are not your organization's core competencies or that may be transactional in nature may be assigned to Third Party Organizations (3POs) that specialize in that particular function. By nature of their specialization and/or by moving segments of the tasks to low-labor-cost offshore locations, they can perform the tasks significantly more efficiently and more economically than you. For a 3PO relationship to be effective for you it should both save you significant sums of money and also free up your own workers to perform the functions of your core competencies.
   
   
4. Consulting Support - For unique sourcing and supply chain projects requiring specific spend sector expertise, or a particular knowledge set, you can turn to a consultancy having the people who already have the right experience and skill sets you need and judiciously use them on a project to project basis.

Staffing is going to become significantly tighter due to demographics. Guiding your organizations into the effective use of these and other staffing methods will become a survival skill practiced by Supply Chain Managers of the fittest organizations.