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Joe Andraski: An Incredible Supply Chain Journey

February 21, 2014

Andraski's book is entitled "My Incredible Supply Chain Journey, and What You Can Learn From It." The work relates his long and successful career at Nabisco, in the midst of huge changes at the company.

Andraski's tenure in the world of supply-chain management extends back to pre-regulation days, when carriers were ruled by tariffs and strict classifications.

"Then all that went away," he recalls. In a more free-wheeling environment, transportation was combined with warehousing to create the discipline of "distribution," which was followed in turn by "logistics" and finally "supply chain" management.

Andraski credits his success in the corporate world to "the desire to have everybody in your organization be successful." Like every major shipper, Nabisco sought the best freight rates it could get, but it also came to emphasize the need for carriers to be profitable. "That was turning a leaf in the relationship we had with service providers," he says.

Effective supply-chain management begins internally. At Nabisco, the challenge was especially daunting because of a string of mergers and acquisitions that kept an organization in a state of constant flux. On the positive side, "the management team didn't have interest in anything other than making sales and margins," Andraski says. "We were pretty much left to ourselves."

An internship program with universities helped to generate the right entry-level hires. Every two years, each young intern took on a new job within the company. The strategy developed their skills and fostered a fuller understanding of the business. "That made it so much easier to be able to manage a large organization," Andraski says, "rather than taking an older organization with people very much set in their ways."

In addition, Andraski's team took care individually to model each customer and product. The effort yielded "a good, strong foundation of information," he said.

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