At helm of NAPM, Nelson will 'level up' education
By Staff -- Purchasing, 6/3/1999 6:00:00 AM
On May 26, 1999, Dave Nelson, vice president of worldwide supply management for Deere & Co. and member of Purchasing Magazine's Editorial Advisory Board, started his year as president of the National Association of Purchasing Management (napm).
In his role as president, Nelson will be responsible for implementing the organization's five-year strategic plan, a plan that includes expanding membership, recruiting more top-level supply management executives such as Nelson, and restructuring the organization to reflect the realities of today's business climate. Meantime, Nelson's personal goal for his presidency is to see that the organization begins to "level up" its educational offerings to purchasing professionals.
Nelson puts it this way: "Think of the business world as a step chart from kindergarten to the Ph.D. level. The very best purchasing departments and people are operating at the Ph.D. level. But the majority are still at the junior-high or high-school level. Until now, napm has been very focused on teaching skills up to the high-school level. It does this extremely well--better than anyone else. But there are very few courses that teach the college, masters, and Ph.D. levels of supply management. My goal is to see more of these high-level courses being offered by napm."
Lean manufacturing, according to Nelson, is a good example of what might fall into the Ph.D. category of learning. "A very generous estimate," he says, "is that 15% of manufacturing companies actually embrace and employ lean-manufacturing techniques. But, in my humble opinion, lean manufacturing is far superior to what is typically done in American business." Looking at lean companies such as Honda or Toyota--companies that are pushing lean values into their supply bases--Nelson says one finds "quality metrics averaging at around 100 PPM or better, performance to a narrow delivery window of 99.9% or better, plus drastically reduced costs with no sacrifice to profitability."
To achieve these kinds of results, however, Nelson says a new breed of purchasing professionals--"supplier development engineers"--is needed in the field. Such people, he says, will be skilled in such things as lean-manufacturing techniques, sophisticated cost analysis and management, and supplier development.
At Deere & Company, Nelson is currently in process of deploying 100 supplier development engineers (so far, he's got 88 in place), but people with the right sets of skills are not easy to find, he notes. While there are excellent programs at such schools as the University of Wisconsin, Nelson says he has been providing extensive supplemental training in-house to prepare new engineers for their tasks in supplier development.
"The skills needed for supplier development are difficult to acquire," Nelson says. "If it were easy, everyone would be doing it. napm needs to figure out how to teach these high-level skills to its members. My goal is to make the organization aware that it needs to be teaching these types of high-level courses."
But not everyone, according to Nelson, will be easily sold. "If I hadn't lived these ideas and seen the remarkable results--first at Honda and now at Deere--I would probably be less likely to embrace them. If you didn't know that penicillin would help to cure infections, you might hesitate before taking it." Before the purchasing profession can move forward, Nelson says, there also needs to be a shift in how corporate executives think about supply management. "There are too many organizations," he says, "in which purchasing remains buried deep beneath the surface because they don't have the skills they need to operate differently."
In assuming the napm presidency, Nelson says he is hoping to use his high public profile to do something positive for the purchasing profession. "napm is the largest--and best--organization that is trying to improve the purchasing profession. I want to be involved with that effort."
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