Leadership

New Supply Chain Association Built From APICS’ Foundation

The Association for Supply Chain Management, announced this week, will build upon the existing base of APICS while expanding resources to the supply chain community.

A new association for supply chain management is coming to life—with the foundational support of an existing group.

The Association for Supply Chain Management (ACSM), which was announced on Monday, will work to help push the sector forward through educational resources, thought leadership, and corporate assessment programs. The new group is an offshoot of the American Production and Inventory Control Society (APICS), which will continue under the ASCM umbrella.

APICS CEO Abe Eshkenazi, CAE, said that the new organization is intended as a footprint expansion and will offer new resources that APICS didn’t previously offer, with a goal of helping companies extract more strategic value from their supply chains.

“ASCM is the leader for end-to-end supply chain management, bringing corporations and professionals the latest ideas and proven best practices to help transform supply chains,” Eshkenazi stated in a news release. “We want to empower both the people who elevate supply chains and the companies who utilize them.”

ASCM might prove a great resource for supply chain managers, and comes at a time when pain points for supply chain managers are growing. In 2016, APICS and Michigan State University released a study asking managers at 50 major firms what was keeping them up at night. Among the biggest challenges were resource availability, talent, complexity, threats and challenges, compliance, and cost issues.

Eshkenazi noted that the new organization would expand the potential pool of resources to organizations reliant on smoothly running supply chains.

“With ASCM, we recognized an exciting opportunity with this new association to expand our reach and elevate our position even further,” he added. “Something special is happening in supply chain.”

More information about ASCM will be released in the coming weeks, with the goal of a full launch in early 2019.

(Halfpoint/iStock/Getty Images Plus)

Ernie Smith

By Ernie Smith

Ernie Smith is a former senior editor for Associations Now. MORE

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