Lessons from korfball

My academic life is intertwined with the supply chain profession. I have done research covering the entire field, from strategic supply chain choices to detailed production planning. The world of korfball has largely dominated my private life; I have been a player and a coach, but mostly active as a committee member. This sport has its roots in the Netherlands, but is now played in more than 80 countries. It is a mixed team sport in which men and women play together to get the best out of each other to achieve a common goal. I think it is no coincidence that I developed a lot of my energy and ideas in either korfball or in the field of supply chain management. And I think we can learn a lot from korfball in supply chain.

Korfball is designed for team play. It is impossible to score alone. This means that players must know each other’s strengths and weaknesses very well, and the coach must develop a plan to work together in order to score. Many supply chain managers see the tasks that need to be done, but quite often miss the coherence in those tasks, and how those tasks can be distributed among employees so that everyone can contribute maximally to the common goal. Moreover, in business, the weaknesses of colleagues are not often discussed openly. It is important to have that conversation openly so that everyone is on the same page in terms of each other’s expected contribution to the common goal.

Good communication

A good korfball team excels in good communication. Because korfball does not allow players to run when in possession of the ball, players have to be keenly aware of each other so that the ball passing and the action of a fellow player are seamless when attacking. This requires a lot of verbal communication off the pitch beforehand, and a lot of non-verbal communication on the pitch.

When fulfilling the interlinked tasks in the supply chain, it is often in communication that things go wrong in execution – the inventory planner places a last-minute order just to be on the safe side, while the supplier manager knows that the supplier is completely full right now and the delivery time indicated in the system definitely won’t be met.

Female players

At a company where I recently carried out a project, it turned out that several inventory planners and supplier managers were mainly busy with moving placed purchase orders forwards or back – without consulting each other, but driven by SAP. Not to mention the fact that, in korfball, half the players are always female. The staff shortage in supply chain would be solved immediately if that were the case.

Jan Fransoo is Professor Operations and Logistics Management at the Tilburg School of Economics and Management