In Memoriam: Roddy Martin

For those who’ve not heard, I wanted to share the sad news that Roderick “Roddy” Mitchell Martin (1957-2021) passed away last Friday.

Roddy was truly one of those special people that your never forget. He was a brilliant and deeply kind and humble man who was infectiously passionate about supply chain and will be missed dearly by his friends, family, and the broader supply chain community that he touched.?My deepest condolences go out to his family.

?Luckily for us, Roddy recorded a lot of videos, especially in the last year during his tenure as a supply chain evangelist at TraceLink. He passed away from Glioblastoma, a virulent form of brain cancer with a shocking high mortality rate (if you’d like to honor Roddy and help eliminate this deadly disease, his family has requested that donations can be made here). You always learn new things with Roddy, and when I was reading his obituary, not only did I learn that his middle name was “Mitchell” (!), but that he was on the South African national water polo team and served as a combat horse trainer for the South African Defense Force Equestrian unit. If you have 20 minutes to spare, check out this video where Roddy tells a nice story of his life in supply chain.

I’ve been watching some of his old videos over the weekend, and have been equally laughing and tearing up. He really ramped them up this last year, and I feel like he was giving us a nice parting gift somehow. Roddy lived in the Boston area with me and would always reach out when he changed jobs and we’d always always say “we need to get together”, but when he offered to do some vodcasts with him, including one here with Nico Bac (ex-P&G), and another one here with some of his ‘posse’ like Jake Barr, Randy Bradley, Dr John Gattorna, Maeve Magner, and Pat McLagan, I jumped at the chance. Thanks for that gift Roddy – these people are amazing.

There are so many others who I’d love to hear from in their travels with him (and some of his great sayings that I forget), but I’d like to share a little bit of my story with Roddy at AMR Research…

In the 1990s when I left Timberland to get off the shop floor and go to the “dark side” in operations consulting, I really enjoyed reading the writings of the crack staff over at AMR Research. In 1998, I remember reading Roddy’s work for the first time. It was about manufacturing execution systems (MES), with a focus on Pharma, and the importance of digitization as a foundational capability for not just execution, but planning, regulatory compliance, savings, traceability, and inside-out and bottoms-up integration from the plant out to the broader supply chain so that the supply chain was truly capable-to-promise down to any type of plant. It may sound boring, but he really brought it to life and really saw the bigger picture!

After I joined AMR Research in 1999, Roddy really dove into P&G’s transformation and its CEO-led wake-up call for an “outside-in” supply chain starting with the consumer at the “moment of truth” at the retail shelf, and then working backwards to designing an orchestrated end-to-end supply network explicitly designed around that consumer (including passing near-real-time consumer demand unfettered quickly up the supply chain to suppliers – still not well implemented BTW!).

P&G’s Consumer Driven Supply Network (CDSN) mantra was a heavy influence on AMR’s Demand Driven Supply Network (DDSN) concepts and associated maturity model. I had a front row seat in its development, and there were at least a dozen core folks involved in the development of DDSN, but Roddy was instrumental in staying in close collaboration with P&G and testing the DDSN maturity model with the team there including Keith Harrison (chief product supply officer) and the broader supply chain organization(s). The P&G team (and all our manufacturing clients) loved Roddy for his insight and passion, but we did playfully chide Roddy that every time he mentioned P&G (or “the moment of truth” or “drain the swamp”: i.e., removing buffers to truly see reality) for the millionth time in a conversation that he’d have to put a dollar in the proverbial penalty jar!

Roddy didn’t just regurgitate best practices as a formulaic cookbook, but rather wanted to develop capability maturity models and “architectures” (defined broadly) that could really guide any organization to improve. The DDSN capability model was explicitly tied to, and guided by, the supply chain benchmarking work that we did in target industries (i.e., to make sure those capabilities correlated to actual performance improvements). This formal measurement led in part to the whole AMR Supply Chain 25 that’s now morphed into a much bigger thing at Gartner. Anyway, the idea of building performance-proven capability models tested at real firms was something that I took with me to The Hackett Group in the procurement area, but Roddy, being Roddy, and being “extra” (to use the term my teenage daughter uses about me), joined a firm called CCI that had a whole digitized operating platform with an automated capability model at its core.

Roddy left CCI and he often got frustrated with the bureaucracy at the many of the firms he worked for, and was really truly happy when he ended up at TraceLink which sort of went full circle with him... This wasn’t just digitizing MES, but rather, digitizing the end-to-end serialized product supply chain that can more easily orchestrate the end-to-end, side-to-side network that’s demand driven, but also supply aware/optimized to support agility and resiliency to deliver on that consumer/patient promise.

Finally, Roddy was a great synthesizer and connectivist who sought to connect the dots on various methodologies, and this included the topics of agility and resiliency from different domains. For example, Roddy borrowed the agile manifesto of software development and applied it to the supply chain in conjunction with other supply chain experts like Dr. Hau Lee and others. He said that the goal of supply chain agility is in essence to Deliver safe quality products on-time in-full to end customers by: exercising resiliency and responsiveness to their demand; continuously sharing data and orchestrating outcomes in an end-to-end supply network; and using technology to augment the insights of people.

I will close this dedication to Roddy with a call to all of us to heed Roddy’s LinkedIn page where rather than just describing himself, he calls on us to:

?“Make transformation to outside-in "less hard" by understanding & systematically building agility and resilience into your business operating model and E2E business capabilities”.

I will continue to strive for this, and I think Roddy would love it if you did to, and if you also rallied those around you to do the same.?Let’s fight that good fight and spread the good word.

RIP Roddy, I’m really going to miss you.??