August 1997 • Volume 7 • Number 8
Bienvenue au Basics
By Michel Gavaud, CFPIM, CIRM
To say that the Basics of Supply Chain Management
(Basics) course received an overwhelming welcome in France
is definitely an understatement. It was needed, anticipated
and, when released, easily positioned but less easily
marketed. Its preparation went on smoothly. Tests were taken
without excessive anxiety, and the recently received pass
rates allow us to predict a bright future for Basics.
Basics, a need
Ten years ago, the first Certified in Production and
Inventory Management (CPIM) courses were introduced in
France. At that time, it became immediately apparent that
the full certification program had to be prepared.
Candidates usually had a high level of education and wanted
to take all modules, become certified and receive the
certificate. Thus, they would study the entire content of
the program, of which 20 percent of the material was common
to two or more modules. This common knowledge was necessary
right from the beginning!
Anticipating Basics
To meet the demand, a CPIM course in France was organized as
follows. The existing five modules were prepared in sequence
over a one-year span. The class met regularly once every
four weeks and between sessions studied the reading
material. The first two meetings were dedicated to
group-forming, the presentation of various aspects of the
company (mission, objectives, competitive advantages,
volume-variety issues, etc.), its planning system (master
planning) and the continuous improvement approach. These
issues were progressively enriched in the years that
followed. It is now apparent that this material covered 80
to 90 percent of the Basics program.
Positioning the Basics module
Not surprisingly, we found that Basics addresses many
targets:
•People who want to prepare for the CPIM program but doubt that they have sufficient mastery of English and/or of the program content. Basics would be the acid test.
•People who don't want to go through the entire CPIM program, but feel they should know its fundamentals as managers, colleagues or fellow employees of those who have earned the CPIM designation.
•People who feel that the knowledge gained from the Basics course could provide a competitive advantage in employment or consulting.
•People who want to check their knowledge of
production and inventory management in English.
Marketing Basics
With this in mind, our marketing effort was directed towards
certified professionals who then would convince their bosses
or their employees that Basics should be a prerequisite, or
at least strongly recommended, as an introduction to the
primary certification modules. We also targeted the
following groups:
•Manufacturing software editors or integrators, so that they would use the right terminology when developing or selling their services. In addition, this would give them a competitive advantage in a country where CPIM's high reputation is well known.
•Consulting firms in the manufacturing field.
•Engineering schools or universities, to convince them that Basics should be a part of the educational curriculum and, in conjunction with the Test of English for International Communication, (TOEIC), to provide the students with the means to get better paying jobs earlier in their careers.
At its inception, marketing the Basics product was not that easy. It was new and had no past history of success &emdash; there was limited documentation from APICS; skepticism about the content and the value of the module and the quality of the preparation; concern about the difficulty of the test; and the six-week delay between taking the test and getting the results.
The only thing that we could sell was our enthusiasm for
Basics. Through our bimonthly newsletters and word of mouth,
we registered as many as 46 candidates for the March 1997
exams. They were representative of the targets mentioned
above: 18 from an engineering school, 18 from software
companies, five from manufacturing companies and five CPIMs
or CFPIMs as potential instructors.
Preparing the Basics module
We decided to reproduce the method that had proved
successful with the CPIM preparation. No formal courses, but
alternating between self-study and three one-day
training/review sessions at two-or three-week intervals. We
didn't use the Basics Participant Workbook, which too
closely resembled the "Introduction to Materials
Management." Instead, we adapted the content of the first
two days of our CPIM course.
We also constructed a sample test of 60 multiple-choice
questions, all the time wondering whether it would be too
easy or too difficult. When faced with the participants'
level of discouragement after taking this sample test, we
told them that the actual test would probably be easier, and
we prayed that this would indeed be the case.
Taking the exam
In France, multiple-choice questions are not a common way of
taking an exam. In addition, computer-based testing was not
familiar to most of the candidates. However, this was not an
obstacle, and the warm reception at the Paris test center
allayed most of the concerns. The time available was largely
sufficient, even for people who had to consult their
dictionaries often. One student with a CPIM answered the 105
questions in 29 minutes! The main question after the exam
was, "How long will we have to wait for the results?"
Getting the results
The results arrived just in time for our May newsletter.
With 37 passes out of 45, the results were almost as
expected &emdash; not too bad and definitively not too good.
It may be surprising that we were happy not everyone had
passed, but had they done so, this would have led to a
devaluation of Basics and possibly to its rejection by the
schools and companies. The scores of already-certified
students ranged from 314 to 329, which is what we
expected.
The future of Basics
We see the future of Basics as very bright. A second
engineering school has already started the training, even
though the exam window for the second Basics session is at
the worst possible time in France: right in the middle of
vacation time. Four other engineering schools will start the
program before the end of this year. We are also launching a
partnership between universities and industries that should
double the number of registrations. We expect that 10 to 20
percent of the Basics candidates will go on to become CPIM
in the next millennium. Therefore, Basics will contribute to
what we have fought for for years: CPIM becoming the
certification recognized worldwide with people sharing our
values, morals and ethics.
Michel Gavaud, CFPIM, CIRM, is CEO of MGCM. Gavaud co-founded the non-profit society, "CPIM de France" whose bylaws are similar to APICS', and of which he is now honorary president. In addition to co-authoring the French edition of the APICS Dictionary, he has also served as president of the "Commission Pédagogique Nationale des Instituts Universitaires de Technologie" in the field "Organisation et Génie de Production" (Manufacturing Planning, Control and Automation Systems in Technical Universities).
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