EVERY day, thousands of companies perform magic. Millions of parts from thousands of suppliers are manufactured and transported to the right place at the right time, with the correct documentation, and with financial transactions to customers in hundreds of different currencies.

As a supply chain leader with more than 25 years of experience, I still marvel at how it works so effectively and generally reliably, because supply chain management is as much an art as it is a science.

We’ve had an awful lot of practice. Humans have been managing supply chains for a very long time because from the dawn of civilization, we have been using, trading, and transporting materials to survive and thrive. Every empire ever to exist was built on the foundation of trading and supply chain management. The existence of cities was dependent on supply chain management – the better the supply chain, the bigger and more prosperous a city would become.