Our guest blogger Stefan Cucu returns with a blog about dancing......
Every year on my father’s birthday we eat the same cakes and say the same things. The things that are common but very important, e.g. the family and health. Then father blows out the candles and then comes the fateful question: "what work do you do now, my boy?". My response, "well ... I work in Supply Chain" makes him think and then he scans around the room short of speech and suddenly lights up and says "yes, that is all about trucks!”. Then one of the aunts corrects him "No Mihai, Stefan is in sales".
Move action on now and we are in an important Supply Chain conference organised by
an IT business solutions company with a fine reputation. They have invited Mr. Daniel Glaser-Segura, famous professor at the University of San Antonio, Texas to speak. He is charismatic and speaks a little Romanian. His conference speech was exceptional. It was about changing paradigms in business and amongst others, in Supply Chain but also about Romania's position in what is called global competitiveness. From the slide presented, Mr. Segura indicated Romania is bad in this regard so I pursued the topic.
I discovered something called "Global Competiveness Report" published annually by the World Economic Forum: http://www.weforum.org/issues/global-competitiveness. If you position the mouse in the right place Romania will appear at 78th out of 144. It is very poor, especially if we look at our neighbours in traditional comparisons, i.e. Bulgaria and Hungary (60,62 respectively). Greece is at 96, but they deserve it, don’t they!
However, if you dig further to understand the difference to the leading positions, after you eliminate the state & government unprepared lessons, you will see that local industry is also in trouble.
In the full report in section 11.05 there is comment about value chain breadth. We are talking about many local private companies. Well, here we are at position 103! It is refreshing now to think that I work in Supply Chain despite my father`s advice, who installed refineries across multiple continents, speaks perfect English and still believes the petrochemical business is the most profitable.
Finally, I remember a local company manager, who said that a Supply Chain Director deals with finding the "chemistry" that links the company in a single dance (but he did not want to introduce S&OP.... ). I keep in mind the 24th of January where a TV programme showing Romanian politicians performing the Romanian Union dance wonderfully. We are bad in Supply Chain but good at dancing and chemistry.
Read the Romanian version here.
Image ccredit: www.ziare.com
