Legend Kieth Olver

KEITH

Consultant at Booz & Company

OLIVER

You very likely owe the title, if not the substance, of your profession to a British consultant called Keith Oliver. At the dawn of the 1980s, Oliver coined the term Supply Chain Management (SCM), an all-encompassing phrase around which the lives of supply chain professionals has orbited ever since. Like all good origin stories, however, it very nearly wasn’t this way.

In the late 70s, Oliver was busy thinking about a new methodology for linking business departments, breaking down silos and defining a better way for manufacturing, sales and marketing, logistics and finance teams to work together to improve the movement and supply of finished goods. He envisioned a more connected company with more inter-departmental collaboration. It was narrow in its focus, but this was the cradle of modern SCM. And so the term Integrated Inventory Management, or I2M, was born. Snappy, fresh (in the context of 80s business jargon) and concise, Oliver was sure he’d hit the nail on the head with a simple, saleable philosophy.

That was until he actually pitched the idea. In a meeting with executives at Dutch consumer tech firm Phillips, he was met by a room of bewildered faces, the eyes of upper management glazed over. In an article for Strategy+Business, written in 2003, Oliver recalls the subsequent conversation he had with one of Philips’ bemused managers, Mr Van t‘Hoff, who quite rightly wanted to know exactly what I2M was. The conversation went something like this:

• Oliver: “We’re talking about the management of a chain of supply as though it were a single entity, not a group of disparate functions.”

• Van t’Hoff: “Then why don’t you call it that?”

• Oliver: “Call it what?”

• Van t’Hoff: “Total supply chain management.”

Whether Van t’Hoff coined the term is splitting hairs; Oliver dropped the Total, and Supply Chain Management - and the principals that continue to govern modern supply chains - were here to stay. Oliver admits that SCM today looks very different to his original vision, but we are 40 years further down the track.

“Thanks to the collective efforts of executives, practitioners, academics, software vendors, and consultants, we anticipate a long — though sometimes chaotic — life for supply chain management,” he says.