• Living on the CSCMP EDGE 2018 – Nashville

  • CSCMP EDGE. If this combination of words means anything to you, you’re way ahead in your professional supply chain career. If you’re not familiar with it yet, don’t worry. I was in the same boat before and now I’m here writing this post. I’m going to share with you my experience attending the CSCMP EDGE 2018 in Nashville and why you should care about it if you’re even remotely interested in the Supply Chain field.

     

  • Every year, as a part to fulfill its vision/mission statement, CSCMP holds the CSCMP EDGE. CSCMP EDGE is an international supply chain conference where supply chain professionals around the world come together to share their expertise and connect. With more than 100 hours of session on 20 parallel tracks condensed into 3 days, CSCMP EDGE will have something for everyone to learn about the cutting-edge development within the supply chain industry. The complete list of session of the 2018’s conference can be found here, but just to tease you into it, here are some of the sessions that were held during the conference: 

    l  Building Analytics Capability in Organizations

    l  Connect the Dots: How to Build a Robust Multimodal Supply Chain

    l  Supply Chain Management and Financial Performance

    l  The Digital Supply Network and the Future of Blockchain

    l  The “Uber-ization” of Freight 

    Personally, I’m very happy with my experience when I attended. I learned a lot and connected with a lot of interesting people. I participated as a student volunteer, representing the CSCMP Benelux Roundtable for the Future Leaders program. Each roundtable around the world elect a student representative to attend and support the conference. True to its goal to educate, CSCMP provides the attending students with professional development workshops (e.g. how to network and how to set career goals) in order to seize the conference as much as possible. 

    The people that I met were very passionate about the subject. Obviously, supply chain was the main conversation topic. People from all walk of life all around the world come together to talk about supply chain. As a non-supply chain professional myself, it was daunting for me to even participate. But it was surprisingly fun because everyone wants to teach you something. Everyone wants to tell you about their job and what do they do in their daily roles. At the end of the day, I gain a new-found sense of wonder of how vast the world of supply chain is and the intricacies involved.

     If any one thing that I mentioned above intrigued you even a little bit, I encourage you to get connected with your local roundtable. They’re one of the warmest, most welcoming community I’ve ever got in contact with.

    This event report was written by Budi Pratomo. Budi was the winner of the 2018 student competition and awarded with a trip to the Annual CSCMP Edge conference.