Supply Chain Lessons from an Obituary

I like to read the obituaries in the newspaper, especially the ones in the weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal. Most of the people featured are unknown to the general public, or at least to me, but they accomplished great things in life despite dealing, in many cases, with great obstacles or challenges early on. 

Take Paul A. Strassmann, for example. I had never heard of him, but according to a profile by James R. Hagerty in this weekend’s WSJ, Stassmann had “a diverse career spanning from WWII resistance fighter to IT roles in major corporations [such as General Foods, Kraft, and Xerox]. Stassmann critiqued wasteful tech spending, advocating for aligning IT investments with reorganized business processes for efficiency…[He also] emphasized practical tech use over chasing trends.”

Strassmann died on April 4 at the age of 96. I encourage you to read the full article for more details about his personal and professional lives — including how during World World II, at the age of 15, “he fled into the woods, in the direction of gunfire, with the aim of joining resistance fighters [against the Nazis] known as partisans.”

But here is the excerpt from the article that prompted me to write this post:

[Strassmann] studied hundreds of companies and found many were racing to keep up with rivals on tech spending without first figuring out what they really needed. Processes and flows of information might need to be totally reorganized before computers could improve efficiency enough to pay for their costs, he wrote.

“It is not computers but how a firm manages them that makes the difference,” he wrote in Datamation magazine in 1997. Simply funneling more information to employees and managers wasn’t enough, he argued: “What matters is not what people see on their computer screens, but what informed actions they take with what they learn.”

We’re now in 2025 and everything he said 28 years ago remains true today.

“Stop viewing technology as a silver bullet,” is one of the New Year’s Resolutions I offered to supply chain and logistics executives at the start of 2017. Here’s what I wrote at the time:

With so much innovation happening in technology, it’s so easy to chase the next new shiny thing, whether it’s artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), and countless other emerging technologies. But technology won’t solve your supply chain problems or help you improve unless you also address the most common culprits of poor supply chain performance: poor data quality, lack of resources and training, lack of metrics and accountability, and poor communication and collaboration with trading partners.

Yet, as I highlighted in my post last Friday, while many companies are busy today developing AI strategies and putting robots in their warehouses, they’re also continuing to ship lots of air — that is, packing tiny items into giant parcel boxes and trailers leaving distribution centers not fully loaded to their maximum legal capacity.

I didn’t know it at the time, but I was echoing Strassmann when I wrote “Forget Innovation, Just Execute Better” in March 2013. Here’s the first sentence of that post:

Have we reached the point where we should just focus on executing better with the systems and processes we have than chase the next technological or process innovation?

And I end that post with the following:

Forget about offering same-day delivery if your lead time variability is all over the place today. Don’t think about implementing in-memory business intelligence if your data quality sucks. And if your store inventory system says a product is in stock, but you can’t find it in the back room or on the shelf, forget about giving your store associates iPads to walk around with. If you can’t execute, then what makes you think you can innovate?

Strassmann probably wasn’t thinking specifically about supply chain visibility solutions when he said “What matters is not what people see on their computer screens, but what informed actions they take with what they learn,” but his point applies to it, nonetheless.

Again, I was unknowingly echoing Strassmann when I wrote in April 2022 that “To derive business value from visibility, you have to do something with the data and insights collected. It’s the doing, the actions taken to improve your transportation and logistics operations, for example, that ultimately delivers value.” 

Source: Talking Logistics