Video Transcript

Jacob, Host at Logistics Degree
Question: What is something you do not love about working in supply chain management?

Nathan, Logistician:
Any job within supply chain is going to be tasked with finding ways to optimize, save money or decrease risk. Two common paths for supply chain graduates are an analyst or a planner. So that’s a data analyst, a global supply analyst, a material planner or demand planner. Those are the common ones. The other side of this is that you could be a customer service rep if the company that you’re working for provides supply chain services such as a logistics provider. I would say that any job at UPS or FedEx is a supply chain job because ultimately the product is a supply chain service. So there are a few different ways that you could approach that, but those are two different paths that you could go down. The world is not perfect, I think. I think that’s the number one thing. There are tons of miscommunication between countries around the world, too. There are tons of different political events that happen around the world that could even stem from the us-china trade war to what’s happening in Ukraine with Russia. There are just so many different disruptions that can throw off your whole process. I guess this bring us to a little bit of a lower point. Let’s talk about the Suez Canal and Egypt. One ship I think it was a year ago, it turned in a 90 degree angle and it completely stopped the whole Suez canal, everybody passing through it for I think it was a week or so that cost companies around the world at least $10 billion just for the zeros you can add. Yeah And in some industries that doesn’t matter. But in medical device, for instance, you’re not able to give these vaccine containers or syringes or operational scalpels or needles, whatever the case may be. You can’t get it to the clinics on time. You have to move surgery. So it really starts to do a domino effect. If you mess up one detail, the whole thing can cascade and have a big problem. So for example, let’s say you’re a purchasing agent and you say we need 1,000 parts part ABC. Well, you’re supposed to order 10,000, not 1,000. That’s just one zero. Suddenly now the production line doesn’t have what they need and they get backlogged and then you’re to blame and it’s really bad. So there’s all sorts of automations people have tried to make to prevent those errors, but there’s always going to be risk of that. So you just got to be careful about those details. So the second thing I don’t like is that taking time off can be hard sometimes because supply chains never sleep. And so I had a client one time and I failed to run their inventory numbers promptly. And so then they didn’t have the data they need until too late. And they realized, Oh no, what the lead times we have. In other words, how fast can we get the product? We will actually run out of inventory before we get another shipment. And I was like, oh, I’m sorry. So you got to watch out for that, too. Yes, you always have the opportunity to learn, but the learning curve sometimes can be really high, especially when you’re in a field or at a company where there’s a lot of things to learn in a short amount of time. And that’s very common in logistics and in supply chain, because you’re oftentimes working with end to end processes that have a lot of different components that work together to create the overall process. The amount of changes, whether it be regulatory, whether it be where your place of employment. It’s really hard to get a real good footing on what your day’s going to look like in the chemical industry specifically. There’s always changes to the rules and regs around the makeup of chemicals and how dangerous they are to carry.