For the previous couple of decades, you have poured your heart and soul into some aspect of supply chain management. Maybe you were a plant manager or an extremely successful account to get a logistics service provider (LSP), or perhaps you sat in the huge chair and ran a global distribution chain for a Fortune 500 business.
Supply chain takes on myriad business disciplines from sourcing to manufacturing, inventory optimization to logistics. The funny thing is, even if you ask many people who have spent their careers in the supply chain, 1 thing is almost always accurate: Nobody intended to get into this organization. But when they had been in, it disturbs their DNA and leaving never became a consideration.
You found yourself on the back end of your career, wondering what to do. You and your partner are entrenched in the community you’ve lived in for years. Do you really wish to move to this phase of life? What’s next? Can you take another job with a major company that will eventually downsize you? It doesn’t seem very appealing.
Is A Supply Chain Management Franchise Opportunity Right For You?
Imagine if you can begin your own business and remain in your own community and put your supply chain expertise to work for your loved ones?
There are several supply chain franchise opportunities worth considering. All of them come with some kind of technology merchandise from which you can run your business and offer customers mission-critical features such as digital shipping score, dispatch and tracking. These systems are one-shipment-at-a-time models. They’re useful but not very strategic.
Given your background in handling the supply chain for a huge company, you are likely used to arriving at it from a more tactical level. The technology you are used to doing over the fundamental TMS. It versions global networks, stock, and transport positions. This is the toolset you’re utilized to.
Why dumb down it and learn something really one-dimensional? Look for a franchise system that allows you to put your expertise with the supply chain and its related technology to work for you. While supply chain management has been slower to accommodate modern technologies than other company models, the sector as a whole is gradually starting to modernize. Automation and robotics are slowly taking over for individual links in the supply chain.
This industry keeps getting younger, with another generation of employees taking management jobs in established supply chain businesses. All these millennials are largely reliant on technologies in their everyday lives, and they’re integrating it in their new career path as well. If your company cannot give the breadth and depth of technologies these youthful managers are seeking, you will be nothing more than another apartment squirrel on the highway of innovation.
You’ve Decided to Make the Leap. Now What?
If you’ve decided to take another step and establish your own supply chain franchise, you will find several components from your past career you will be able to undertake your new journey.
Ideally, you have the appropriate funding in place to start a supply chain management franchise. If not, networking and selling yourself is key to secure the capital needed to pay franchising fees. In the past, you established a stronger work ethic than your competitors and built trust with your customers on the way. In this aspect, your client base is near established, since people buy from people with whom they feel comfortable. Comfort and trust are developed through dialogue that is both real and purposeful.
Having a supply chain management franchise, your client base is often as big as you wish to create this, or as intimate and small, so as to guarantee more hands-on maintenance. Together with your own franchise, you can also choose from which skills to concentrate, possibly attracting a unique population of customers that you previously would have been not able to reach. You can control your own destiny and craft your future.
Also read: How Attribute-Based Planning Can be Used For A Green Supply Chain
With your supply chain management expertise, you know the ins and outs of this business well enough to write a strong and persuasive business strategy. Make sure you keep it continuously updated because the one thing that’s constant in the modern world of supply chain management is change. While you may not have all the answers, if you are nimble, you’ll be able to seek the advice of your staff and do everything that makes sense at the present time.
Throughout your supply chain career, you were the in-house expert, a de facto adviser who got things done effectively and economically. I would recommend aligning using a distribution chain franchise system that allows you to keep being the expert for your clientele. They’ll love you for it, and nobody could possibly downsize you again!
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