This is the most common starting point for what eventually becomes a significant capability investment journey. Many experienced leaders are surprised to find themselves here.
If you are in a period of orientation — sensing that something in your supply chain capability needs attention but without a clearly named initiative, timeline, or investment in view — this is the most common starting point for what eventually becomes a significant capability investment journey.
Many experienced leaders are surprised to find themselves here. That reaction is common and usually reflects the complexity of the situation rather than the maturity of the team. Supply chain capability investment decisions are rarely straightforward. The organisations that navigate them well are often the ones that slowed down deliberately at this stage rather than reaching for a solution before the problem was fully understood.
This stage is not passive. It is where experienced leaders clarify what they are actually trying to achieve, why it matters now, and what good would genuinely look like if they got this right. The work here is less about choosing a solution and more about understanding what kind of organisation, capability, or operating model you are really working towards.
Teams at this stage often feel pressure to do something before the problem is fully understood — particularly when signals are coming from multiple directions simultaneously.
Common patterns include jumping prematurely to solution areas before the root cause is clear; conflating symptoms with root causes and treating the visible performance gap as the problem rather than investigating what is producing it; and struggling to articulate the issue clearly enough for others to engage meaningfully.
A related challenge is that different functions are often working from different mental models at this stage. Supply chain, finance, IT, and leadership may all be using different language to describe the same situation. Until those differences are surfaced, teams can appear aligned on the surface while talking past each other underneath.
The assumption most practitioners at this stage are operating on is that the problem is one of information... that with enough research, enough peer conversations, enough events, the right direction will eventually become clear.
What tends to keep people stuck at the orient stage is not a shortage of information. It is that the information available is almost entirely supply-side: vendor content calibrated to lead toward a solution, analyst frameworks describing an idealised maturity journey, and peer conversations that confirm the struggle is real without helping to name it precisely enough to act on. The question that tends to unlock movement is not "what should I do?" but "what is the specific thing that is limiting performance, and is my read of it correct?" Those are different questions, and the second one is much harder to answer from inside the organisation.
The outside-in view at this stage tends to surface not a direction but a more accurate framing of the problem, which is usually more useful, because a well-framed problem has a much shorter list of plausible responses.
BPC's outside-in view at this stage comes from practitioners who have been through comparable decision journeys in comparable organisations. Tell us about your context and we can find the most relevant starting point.
Timing: Thu 16 Jul · 15:00 BST · 60 minutes
Focus: Supply chain leaders who are earlier in their planning transformation journey — new in role, new to a capability area, or not yet clear on the specific problem they are trying to solve.
Format: Practitioner-led peer discussion facilitated by BestPractice.Club
Once a month, a small group of senior supply chain leaders gets on a call with no agenda, no host and no record. The conversation goes wherever it goes. Nothing is minuted, nothing is shared externally, and nobody is pitching anything.
Sessions run on the first Friday of each month at 12.30 UK time, for 60 minutes. Places are limited to keep the conversation genuinely open.
If you have something on your mind that you would not say in a recorded session, this is the place for it.
BestPractice.Club is not a consultancy and does not provide advisory services based on full organisational discovery.
What you see here reflects pattern recognition drawn from many years of conversations with supply chain and operations leaders facing real, high-stakes decisions. It is intended to help you orient yourself, clarify your decision position, and understand what often proves useful at similar points — not to provide definitive advice tailored to your specific circumstances.
Any suggestions are indicative, not exhaustive, and are made without full visibility of your organisation, constraints, or risk profile. Decisions remain yours, and should be tested against your own data, context, and governance processes.
If a pattern doesn’t quite fit, that’s normal. They are distilled from many examples from varying contexts. Decisions rarely move in straight lines with teams often revisiting earlier stages as new information emerges. If it would help to talk through your situation and sense-check where you are, you’re welcome to schedule a short conversation.