Time to discard porters original value chain?

So, unless value is captured upstream it can not be delivered downstream – this is why procurement is in pole position in the supply chain. Unfortunately, many procurement organizations do not assert this pole position in their organization and so fail to influence the value chain. These organizations focus on increasing supply chain efficiency – but fail to see the big prize. That is a strategically integrated supply chain from suppliers through to the end customer. Porters view of procurement as a support function in the value chain should be discarded, and the following maxim embraced:

“We buy, we add value, and we sell” and we must excel in each activity to be successful.

Do you agree or disagree?

read more

A three part guide for procurement professionals and training mangers to assess how E-learning can be an effective part of their professional development

Here in part 3 we discuss how our model produces measurable outcomes and sum up the topic.

1. Measuring Learning Outcomes

By starting with the end in mind the course design aims to facilitate a best practice approach to the way Purchasing Practice is conducted. By targeting very specific learning outcomes at the setting goals and objectives stage, participants are presented with the opportunity to learn how to manage a range of specific procurement issues and challenges. They learn to identify and list the key issues, where the vocational model can help learners to acquire:

• appropriate behavioral responses to difficult problems
• personal attributes such as interpersonal skills, to encourage teamwork and taking responsibility
• wider knowledge of the complexity of procurement issues, to help with decision-making
• specialist subject matter skills

This approach facilitates a range of interactive quizzes which allow the learner to assess their own understanding and with more formal assessments determine whether the learner has mastered the subject matter.

2. Conclusion

Your E-learning initiatives don’t need to fail. You can succeed where other corporations have failed. We believe that our Vocational model fits well into the bigger picture in supporting the corporate learner with the following benefits:

1. Our fly on the wall environments avoid bad habits being learned and promote good habits which the learner can spread across the organization.
2. The format is highly engaging and keeps learners attentive, and so learning is increased.
3. Cognitive load principles facilitate immediate understanding.
4. Flash/HTML utilization directly supports the most advanced SCORM learning management system.
5. Animation allows a wide range of contexts and characters, which people enjoy.
6. Movies provide a way of communicating without telling, placing the onus on the student to learn and draw conclusions.

So if you are interested in implementing corporate E-learning, you will naturally want to achieve tangible results in terms of increased efficiency and effectiveness in executing purchasing practice. To achieve this goal in a competency focused environment, procurement staff must display the behavior and abilities required in their competence profiles. These results can be achieved through E-learning. However, highly effective course material is essential, and this only can be achieved through good instructional design and content delivery using the tools and techniques we have described.

Remember: that, if a course is not effective, it will not improve performance and, therefore, it has no value at all.

A three part guide for procurement professionals and training mangers to assess how E-learning can be an effective part of their professional development

Here in part 2 we discuss how our model produces content that is both engaging and facilitates immediate understanding.

1. Producing a Procurement Soap Opera

The course design hinges on animated movie episodes, presented in the style of a TV ‘soap’.

Features that are incorporated into the design of each episode include:

• Clear learning goals and objectives
• Real life ‘scenarios’ learners will recognize and relate to
• Cognitive load principles to avoid short term memory overload which prevents learning
• Sophisticated dialogue and compelling storyline
• interactivity, via quizzes, knowledge testing and assessments

The instructional design is therefore aimed to facilitate a range of learner benefits that include:

1.1   Clear learning goals and objectives

Learning goals are clearly defined at the onset together with the target audience for the course.

These are then placed within a specific scenario and presented perfectly to demonstrate procurement best practice. Because it is E-learning one benefit is that it can then be utilized to expose learners to the most efficient methods of learning.

We learn by doing. So one of our goals is to embed various activities and practice screens that will help to reinforce the learning material, accelerate and solidify the mastery of course goals and to track and qualify the learner’s progress.

1.2   Cognitive Load Principles

Cognitive load theory, one of the most scientific researched theories of learning and the brain; says that teaching will be far more efficient if it is conducted in the way the brain works.

The working memory is a barrier to learning; information presented is processed and only upon clear understanding, will it flow to the long-term memory. Therefore, information needs to be presented in a simple manner, so as to limit the load on the short term memory.

Our courses therefore apply cognitive load principles to support the learning process and facilitate immediate understanding:

• New information arrives – via your ears (audio channel) and/or eyes (visual channel) – and is then presented to our brain. There it is first processed by our working (short-term) memory before being stored in our long-term memory in the form of schema’s or pictures. This is the basic learning process.
• Unlike the working memory, which is momentary, long term memory provides permanent storage and unlimited capacity. The key to learning is therefore, storing the information in your long term memory. This is when learning occurs.

The benefits of applying cognitive lead principles into our course design are that we facilitate immediate understanding. This is unique in procurement training.

1.3   Technology

Flash/HTML5 is our development tool of choice. It is seamless and streamlined. It can pass information straight from the Flash interface directly to our database or the most advanced SCORM learning management system. In stark contrast the majority of suppliers use MS Word and Power Point which have no capability to pass information back to an LMS or SCORM values at this time. Despite this we estimate that more than 90% of all procurement E-learning content uses these limited and static software tools for E-learning development.

Most suppliers employ Articulate, Lectora, and or Captivate to create a simple online electronic page turner, what a missed opportunity. No wonder so many E-learning projects are considered a bore and fail a few days after the launch.

These development approaches rely on several different tools to achieve the same results Flash/HTML5 can do all by itself. For comprehensive E-learning instructional design, production development and team collaboration, our approach produces superior results.

1.4    Animated Visuals

Our animated movie style serves to engage learners in a vivid learning experience. Yet we believe that because it uses a ‘soap opera’ approach to depict characters and scenarios, it also permits the necessary distance for observation, analysis and assessment – in essence it allows the learner to ‘eavesdrop’ to be a ‘fly on the wall’ observing positive behavioral responses to difficult situations.

The benefits of this animated approach rather than video have been borne out by research:

• Animation allows a wide range of contexts and characters, and yet still produces quality movies.
• People enjoy animations—the simplicity of the graphics lets people use their imaginations in relating to the characters.
• The graphics do not intrude on the material being studied as much as videos.

1.5   Carefully Scripted Audio

Scripts are carefully developed to translate the learning goals into real life scenarios to which buyers will relate. It combines with the visuals seamlessly to support the objective of immediate understanding.

The scripting is intended to help learners to evaluate critically the scenario being played out, looking at the contexts in which the characters are placed—in order to understand the procurement landscape.

1.6   Interactive & Engaging

As learners engage via the movie in the interplay of different factors associated with procurement, they are invited to interact with the subject matter.  There are opportunities for the learner to analyze and assess the issues raised in each scenario, in order to develop capabilities in working with, and managing procurement.

An intuitive interface is provided and the narrative-based movie with its visual, audio and graphic clues is designed to be easy to use and accessible to different types of learner; the movie engages the learner in a real life experience. Crucially, the movie format provides a way of communicating without telling, placing the onus on the student to learn and draw conclusions.

This is experiential based learning that is built upon the principles of storytelling, a medium through which we can communicate meaningfully with each other. Participants are encouraged to relate the story to their own experiences and to work with these, translating learning into action. There is specific advice on how to use and enhance their newly acquired knowledge in actual situations; they are likely to face at some time in their day jobs. The individual scenarios help learners to broaden the concepts out to a wider stakeholder community.

In the third and final part we will discuss learning outcomes and draw conclusions on the requirements for implementing effective E-learning.

.

Here in Part 1 we introduce some of the problems associated with e-learning, discuss how corporate professionals learn and introduce our solution to E-learning.

1.       Introduction

The advantages of E-Learning are so apparent, that all companies will adopt E-Learning in future.  Yet today the reality is that most e-learning is considered a bore; and so it quickly falls into disuse and so it fails.

The problem with most learning is that too much/complex information is presented to the learner and as a result, the working memory quickly gets overloaded and learning simply stops. This is true for all learning but especially for corporate learning (and even more for E-Learning), as – in general and unlike students – corporate learners will be exposed to the course only once. Most teaching does not take into account the way we learn and so it often fails. This is a simple truth and unfortunately applicable to most of E-learning!

Our scenario based animated courses are designed to overcome this problem.  In these scenarios students follow the activities of Daniel, a Buyer as he works in different organizations and industries learning specific real world aspects of procurement.

2.       Learning by observing and doing

Typically corporate professionals come into the workplace after completing their formal education at a university, business school or college. From the point they enter the corporate world, most find they are responsible for their own continuous professional development. This is true even when their organization provides access to learning opportunities. The reality for most is that the day job simply gets in the way of continued formal learning.

So how do most people learn whilst doing their day job? The answer is that they observe their peers and superiors and through a process of rationalizing, reject what doesn’t work for them and take on board what does work for them, and then put it into practice. This is how we develop our real life skills and get ready for our next promotion.

The down side of this approach is that organizations are dysfunctional, to various degrees. By this we mean that to differing levels in all organizations, issues such as weak governance, poor processes, silo mentality and turf wars do not provide the basis of a good  learning experience/role model – and so bad habits are learned. The techniques adopted by the learner therefore, will only be as good as the environment in which they were learned. This is why we are all the sum of the experiences we have either been fortunate or unfortunate enough to have been exposed to.

3.       An Experiential Model of E-learning

We have introduced an experiential model for e-learning which encourages learners to: (1) Observe, (2) Analyze, (3) Assess, and (4) Act. It seeks to draw on the strengths of learning by observing and doing – by creating a ‘best practice’ real life scenario for the learner to observe.  Our model uses a combination of narrative and technology to support specific learning goals in real life situations that ‘dramatizes’ key aspects of our curriculum. The benefits of our vocational model are:

• By creating a best practice environment to observe, we avoid the issues of dysfunctional organizations and ensure that good practice is observed, good habits acquired and reinforced by the learner and spread across the organization.
• It is highly successful in engaging and keeping learners attentive, and so learning is increased.

The scenario framework helps the participant learn about a real life procurement challenge or learning event in a fictional company, and observe how Daniel and his colleagues manage it. In fact it is not an uncommon phenomenon, just as in a TV soap, for participants to form attachments to the characters as if they know them.

We have received excellent feedback and testimony from buyers.

In part 2 we will discuss how our model produces content that is both engaging and facilitates immediate understanding.

read more

An explosion on March 31 in Marl, Germany at Evonik Industries, the German chemical maker, killed two people and took out one of the industry’s biggest producers of cyclododecatriene, or CDT. The material is used widely in PA-12, a nylon found in coatings and connector applications in cars’ fuel injection and braking systems.

read more

read more

Rio Tinto Alcan (NYSE: RIO), aluminum producer is currently struggling to source metal in order to supply customers during the short-term squeeze in the Asian market. The company is fully covered as far as long-term contracts go although has no additional metal on offer to expand the market. The tight supply among Asia is adding to an already high price for metal in the region.

read more