Pan-Pacific Conference XXXIV. Designing New Business Models in Developing Economies

the skills shortage remains as critical as ever,
suggesting that training interventions are not meeting
the requirements of the industry. As stated by [21],
“It’s not just that we are short of people with skills,
but we are short of people with the right skills: people
who link their functional role and activities to the
needs of the supply chain within which they operate.”
According to the latest Manpower Group [13] global
talent shortage survey, employers indicated that the
top reasons why positions are not filled are: lack of
available applicants (24%), lack of hard skills (19%),
lack of experience (19%), looking for more pay
(14%) and lack of soft skills (11%). The importance
of soft skills has been highlighted in numerous
studies globally and summarised in previous work by
the authors [8]. These works suggests that soft skills
are critical to the success of supply chains. The
authors also find that companies understand that the
most critical skills to the supply chain are all soft
skills and technical or hard skills are all rated of
lower importance in the ranking of importance of
these skills. This indicates that simply training people
in the traditional hard skills required to do their jobs,
will not meet the supply chain needs of the future.
In South Africa, supply chain training is generally
provided by traditional academic universities,
technical universities, FET (further education and
training) institutions and in-house training initiatives
provided by companies involved in the industry. A
brief review of some of the current training offerings
reveals that traditional academic programmes [14]
[15] [18] [19] tend to be largely focussed on technical
skills. Similarly, programmes offered by universities
of technology also tend to focus their programmes on
technical skills [5] [17] [20]. The identification of
soft skills as critical to supply chain performance and
the general focus of the training offerings in South
Africa suggests that there is a mismatch between
supply chain requirements and training for the supply
chain. The implication is that supply chain training
needs in the country need to be reviewed in order to
develop new training models that are capable of
meeting the future supply chain needs in the country.
RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
The objective of this paper is to review the skills sets
typically required by logistics and supply chain
organisations in Southern Africa and to assess the
appropriateness thereof, given the skills required to
facilitate economic growth and development in
developing economies.
To determine any trends or possible changes to the
current logistics skills requirements, as perceived by
practitioners in South Africa, the results of two
surveys, conducted in 2012 and 2016 at the Annual
SAPICS conference (Association for Operations
Management in Southern Africa), are compared. The
SAPICS conference is recognised as the leading
logistics and supply chain management conference in
Southern Africa. The approach used was convenience
sampling, whereby responses were obtained from
SAPICS attendees. For the 2012 survey, a two-page
self-administered questionnaire was used, and for the
2016 survey, a web-based survey was utilised to
solicit responses. In both questionnaires, respondents
were requested to rate the perceived importance of
the selected skills items typically required by logistics
and supply chain organisations on a four-point Likerttype
scale (1 = to no extent and 4 = to a large extent).
The surveys were completed by 155 respondents in
2016 and 200 in 2012. The response rate for both
years is approximately 17%, which was deemed
adequate for the purposes of the study.
Although the number of respondents could be viewed
as a shortcoming of the study the researchers,
however, are of the opinion that the specific sampling
pool was enabled the obtaining an acceptable number
of responses from supply chain professionals which
could be interpreted as adequately representative of
the practitioners’ perspective.
RESULTS
The results of the two practitioners’ surveys were
analysed and compared to determine whether there
has been any shift in the skills requirements as
perceived by supply chain managers. The majority of
the respondents are from the transport, storage and
communication and manufacturing sectors, 60.6%
and 66.5 for 2016 and 2012 respectively. For both
surveys, just over 76% of the respondents were
middle and senior managers, suggesting that they can
be viewed as the decision-makers within their
respective organisations. The average years of work
experience of all respondents in both surveys was
over 16 years, with the average experience in the area
of logistics and supply chain management being over
8.5 and 10 years for 2016 and 2012 respectively.
Over 90.5% (2016) and 95% (2012) of the
respondents had completed tertiary qualifications.
The survey data was analysed using SPSS for
Windows version 23. The reliability of the
measurement scale was evaluated to determine the
internal consistency. The overall Cronbach’s value
for all the skills items was 0.950 and 0.921 for 2016
and 2012 respectively, which indicates that the
surveys are very reliable [6]. In both survey’s
respondents were asked to indicate their agreement
with a list of 30 logistics and supply chain skills
managers consider as important when recruiting
employees [8] [11]. The mean and standard deviation
were calculated to derive the descriptive profile of the
skill items, thus establishing the ranking of the skills
in terms of their perceived importance. Table 1
depicts the descriptive statistical results of the skills
items for both years. Whereas the order of the top ten
ranked skills changed from 2012 to 2106, the top ten
skills were consistent in both years. The top ten
highest ranking skills comprise mostly ‘softer’ (i.e.
Behavioural/ Interpersonal) and very broad
management skills (i.e. General Management). In the
2016 survey the ‘Ability to see the big picture’
followed by ‘Customer focus’ are the highest ranked
Logistics Awareness skills which feature in the top
ten list.
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