Being a leader in the supply chain industry means using every tool at your disposal, making smart decisions, and consistently executing to the best of your ability. This starts by being informed of, and staying up to date on, industry trends and news headlines, especially those relevant to your sector, whether your focus is motorsports or consumer packaged goods.

We recently sat down with Ryan Toon, Purchasing Program Manager at Ford Motor Company, to aid our efforts in assembling a list of the top habits every supply chain leader should aspire to exude.

Each month the Institute of Supply Management makes a calculation called the ISM MFG Index. The U.S. government takes this calculation very seriously, and many companies track it for future planning purposes. Making sure you know how to interpret this number can help you with that same purpose.

There are many certifications available for supply chain professionals looking to acquire the skill sets to address the complex supply challenges of today. Certifications also provide added credentials that can allow professionals to advance at their current companies or become more attractive candidates in the job market.

The best performing supply chain operations in the world didn’t start out as highly efficient profit centers. Through struggle and sometimes failure, leading companies have refined, adapted, and improved processes to meet the needs of the organization and customers.

In 1990 C.K. Prahalad and Gary Hamel published The Core Competence of the Corporation that to this day is the most reprinted article in the history of the Harvard Business Review (HBR). It keeps getting reprinted because its premise is still very relevant (perhaps more so today). This core competency article argues that every organization needs to focus all of its scarce, limited, and valuable resources (manpower, machines, money, management, and material – the 5Ms) on being the best at one specific thing (your core competency).

Supply Chain as a Service is a virtual supply chain team enabled by cloud software that supports all or part of a company’s supply chain operations. A virtual Supply Chain as a Service team partners with a company’s existing team to execute procurement, production control, manufacturing, quality, warehousing, and logistics projects or daily operations.

Total cost of ownership (TCO) is the sum of all costs associated with every activity of the supply stream during the acquisition of a given service, component or product. During the sourcing process, a TCO analysis groups certain cost inputs into specific categories to display the full visibility of all costs when making a sourcing decision. These costs are commonly referred to as direct costs, indirect costs, acquisition costs, life cycle costs, purchase price, and end of life costs. Together, these cost categories represent not only the purchase price of the service, component or product but also the cost of acquiring it, maintaining it, and disposing of it.

Successful stock investing strategies have long included developing a diversified portfolio of assets to reduce overall investment risk. As with mitigating risk in your investment portfolio, mitigating risk in your supply chain can be accomplished by ensuring your suppliers and their suppliers are different companies having a host of different risk profiles thus reducing your overall supply risk.

Efficiency, is a word often associated with automation, time savings, productivity, and now Radio Frequency Identification (RFID). “Driving Efficiency” is a frequently used term in the office, usually followed up with the question; How do we achieve this? One of the technologies that is more recently seeing expansive and creative use to drive efficiency in the Supply Chain world is RFID.