shared interests. This may be nothing more
than an email distribution group, where
folks can ask questions and someone who
has an answer can post back to the group.”
A somewhat more structured group also
can take advantage of Web 2.0 and other
social networking technology, says Cote.
“Basically, this technology enables companies to leverage the intelligence of many
employees,” he says. “They can establish a
center of excellence to draw on the thinking
of a whole bunch of people without requiring these employees to dedicate too much
of their time. It can be structured and modeled in such a way that it is searchable and
useful to the entire organization.”
If designed correctly, this type of knowledge base also protects against losing critical knowledge when a person leaves the
organization, says Censeo senior associate
Anjali Kampschulte. Having such knowledge available in the face of large scale layoffs or in the case of spin-offs or mergers
“has a significant positive impact,” she says.
“And it provides a way for really talented
individuals to share their ideas and
thoughts, which contributes to job satisfaction and retention of these people.”
Academic COEs
Another way to get the benefits of a COE is
to partner with centers of excellence at universities. P&G, for example, is active in several such centers, including those at MIT
and McCombs Business School at the University of Texas, Austin.
“We have been a significant player for
years in working with the academic community on the supply chain front—not only
in North America but around the world,”
says Barr. “We help them identify breakthrough ideas which causes us to come
back and think about how our industry and
our company might be impacted.”
Chris Caplice, executive director of the
Center for Transportation and Logistics at
MIT, says CTL has three mandates: to stay
on the cutting edge of supply chain
research; to provide educational opportunities not only for graduate students but also
for professional people at all levels, from
executives to front-line managers; and to
have a strong corporate outreach program.
“We can’t just be doing things in theory. We
need the practical application and the interactions that you get from working with
companies and with governmental agencies,” he says.
CTL saw several years ago the impact of
globalization on its corporate sponsors and
it, too, began looking outside the U.S. Its
first cross-border partnership was in 2003
with the University of Zaragoza and the
government of Aragón in Zaragoza, Spain.
This partnership allows researchers from
MIT and the Zaragoza Logistics Center
(ZLC) to experiment with new logistics
processes, concepts and technologies and
to move research findings quickly into practice. To develop business leaders, MIT-Zaragoza offers graduate and executive
education, in English, to students from
around the world.
Last year MIT helped launch the Center
for Latin American Logistics Innovation
(CLI) in Bogota, Colombia, and others centers are expected to follow, forming what is
now known as the Supply Chain and Logistics Excellence Network or SCALE.
“We find that one center alone can do a
lot of great things, but as with any network,
its impact increases exponentially as you
add more nodes,” says Caplice. “For example, we are starting a project on global risk
that will have teams in all three of these centers as well as a team in China and India.
The goal is to understand how risk is perceived differently in these countries, how it
is managed differently and how it is mitigated in different areas. So what this whole
network of excellence is doing is finding the
best practices across different stakeholders,
different geographies and different cul-
tures.”
Edgar Blanco, executive director of the
MIT-CLI Alliance, offers an example from
Latin America that involves Colombia’s coffee
growers. In this project, RFID tags are being
attached to bags of bulk specialty coffee from
small farms so they can be tracked through
the supply chain. “We are engaging roughly
30,000 different small farmers who are tagging every one of their coffee bags – close to
one million bags a year,” says Blanco. “These
bags are then tracked and the information is
brought into a central hub where it is shared
with global partners around the globe.” This
project is creating “a tremendous amount of
knowledge about how to deploy RFID at a
micro level, not across some huge corporation, and in very remote areas,” he says.
Another project that MIT and CLI are
working on is the use of low-tech cell
phones—the type widely available in Latin
America—to create a tracking system for fragmented areas of transportation. “Companies
in Latin America often do not have the capability to install global positioning systems, so
we are looking for ways to leverage the existing mobile network and use local capabilities
to connect these companies with traditional
supply chain systems used in the U.S. for
tracking and tracing,” he says.
Learnings from these project would not
be shared without an organization like CLI,
he says. “Talking to different people with different perspectives on a problem is something that may be taken for granted in the
