Mark Baxa, recently named president and chief executive officer of the Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals, discusses his vision of where the organization — and industry — needs to go in the years ahead. 

After serving for some 16 months as interim president and chief executive officer of CSCMP, Baxa has now ascended to that title officially. In the role, he sees a number of challenges that the organization must address, many of them centered on people. 

“There’s a sense of deeper ownership,” he says. “We have a vested interest in helping this organization to fulfill its promise to educate today’s and the future’s supply chain professional.”

There’s a need to accelerate the pace of content that can help those individuals navigate the challenges of today. Baxa says CSCMP needs to make its message more relevant across all aspects of supply chain management, including sourcing, planning, logistics, manufacturing, customer service, talent and sustainability. 

All of this needs to be included in an effort to educate young people. And that means reaching all the way down to high schools, to get students interested in a career in supply chain management at the earliest possible time. The COVID-19 pandemic laid the groundwork for that effort, in that it drove home to the general public the importance of the supply chain, a term that many couldn’t even define a little more than two years ago. Now, everyone seems to know what it means, and Baxa wants to take advantage of that newfound awareness to enlist a new generation of students in the discipline. “We want to be ready in terms of supporting the workforce in a much broader and more comprehensive way,” he says. 

Baxa is also shepherding an effort within CSCMP to spur charitable contributions wherever needed, initially in the form of professional aid to Ukraine.