San Francisco CMO Suggests A Career In Supply Chain Management
San Francisco business majors have many occupations to consider before graduation. Among the careers listed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics are accountants and auditors, budget analysts, insurance underwriters and logisticians. Of these four, the occupation with the highest annual salary is Logisticians, tasked to manage a company's supply chain, from production to the end product. One expert in the field is Greg Johnsen, Chief Marketing Officer for GT Nexus, a cloud-based supply chain management firm.
What is your background and education?
"My background has been focused on Silicon Valley-based high technology companies. I spent the past 25 years in product management, marketing and sales roles with companies who pioneered the relational database industry, expert systems, CRM and supply chain automation. I have a B.A. in English from the UC Davis."
What type of services does GT Nexus offer?
"GT Nexus provides a single cloud-based technology platform to hundreds of major companies across various industries such as retail, tech and automotive to automate and control business processes for global trade. We help companies orchestrate the ordering, fulfillment and payment for goods and services across their global commerce networks. Today, the GT Nexus platform handles well over $100 billion of direct supply chain goods traded, making it the single largest technology instance of its kind in the world."
What advice can you share to business majors or related fields?
"The best-run companies are those that do supply chain in expert form. They understand that a great supply chain is a strategic weapon for rapid growth and market dominance. Consider Apple, which wields the best supply chain in the world. They've topped the number one supply chain position on Gartner's Top 25 Supply Chain list four years in a row now and are led by a CEO who is a supply chain executive."
"To engineer a great supply chain requires inter-disciplinary skills across finance, operations, logistics, math, information technology, leadership and communications. I often recommend a humanities-focused undergraduate degree because they can be so cross-disciplinary and open, and because they produce strong communication skills. However, increasingly, supply chain specific programs are emerging at a number of top universities, in undergraduate and graduate levels, and these can be excellent fast-track strategies for anyone interested in a supply chain career—or any career in finance, operations, business development, or general purpose roles in the latest tech start-up."
Randy Yagi is a freelance writer covering all things San Francisco. In 2012, he was awarded a Media Fellowship from Stanford University. His work can be found on Examiner.com Examiner.com.