Dive On In

What scuba reveals about supply chain management

- Damien Martin

What do scuba and supply chains have in common? A lot more than you might think.

For self-described workaholics like Art Koch, forcing themselves to get out of the office and clear their minds can be a revelatory exercise. In scuba diving, Koch found his "form of meditation." There in the ocean's depths, Koch found the brain relaxation and downtime necessary for deep work.

Koch, a supply chain transformation expert and consultant, began to see many parallels between his passion and profession. BOSS took a deep dive with him on those insights.

Back to Fundamentals

"If you don't get the fundamentals or the foundation of scuba diving, you're not going to have fun. You're not going to enjoy it," Koch told BOSS. "You're going to stop, and worst case, it could kill you."

The consequences might not be as dire for supply chain managers, but they'll certainly have a miserable work experience if they don't make fundamentals a foundational part of their approach. They won't advance in their careers, and they could get themselves fired.

"People forget that. They come into work, and they just let the day take over them. You have to stop that."

Just like in scuba, where divers perform a "buddy check" on each other to make sure their equipment is secured and functioning properly before going below the surface, supply chain managers need their own checklists that they run through every day.

These include steps such as checking to make sure the MRP ran and what exceptions it might contain, which of those are critical, and how old they are.

"You put things like that into where you can have a daily visual meeting where you have these parameters up and it's binary, and it's either red or green," he said. "If it's red you have to fix that before the next day, and if it's green, you know you're good. That kind of tells the organization if you're stabilized."