This story first appeared in the July/August issue of Supply Chain Xchange, a journal of thought leadership for the supply chain management profession and a sister publication to AGiLE Business Media & Events’ DC Velocity.
Art Mesher has spent his career thinking deeply about the role that technology should play in the supply chain. This focus began with a desire to improve visibility on the shipping docks at retailer Dayton Hudson, where he had a job unloading trucks. It continued to crystallize while he served as an analyst in Gartner’s Integrated Logistics Strategies Service practice in the 1990s, and it took full bloom at the global trade management software company Descartes Systems Group, where he ultimately served as CEO.
There are a lot of firsts associated with Mesher, who is now chairman of the board at software provider GainSystems. He’s credited with pioneering cloud networks and software-as-a-service (SaaS) models for supply chains. At Descartes, he helped develop the first multicarrier manifest system, the first shipper-carrier electronic data exchange platform, and the first on-demand logistics networks.
But what people seem to remember most about Mesher is a PowerPoint presentation that he gave while at Gartner in the late 1990s. This presentation laid out what he called the “3 V’s of Supply Chain Framework” and identified visibility, velocity, and variability as key principles that supply chains needed to address in order to achieve a competitive advantage.
Two years ago, in an effort to inspire companies to continue focusing on those principles, Mesher, the Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals (CSCMP), and Agile Business Media & Events launched an award competition that takes place at CSCMP’s annual EDGE Conference. This year, the “3 V’s Business Innovation Award Contest” will feature three finalists presenting their companies’ most impactful application of Mesher’s framework in front of a panel of judges. (Information on the competition, including guidelines for submissions, can be found on the CSCMP EDGE website.)
Mesher took some time out to discuss the 3 V’s and the award program with Supply Chain Xchange Executive Editor Susan Lacefield.
Q: Can you tell me the story of how the 3 V’s Framework was developed?
A: So I knew I was leaving Gartner. At that time, Gartner was extremely competitive, and the idea of being a great analyst was about being able to slay dragons or debunk myths or present things differently. The idea was to create something seminal and anthemic. Could you write a piece of research that people would glom onto like an anthem and would also stand the test of time?
You know, when I talk about this with people, I often ask them, “What’s the most seminal and anthemic rock song?” And there’s a fair bit of debate. I’m a “Hey Jude” fan personally, but “Hell’s Bells” gets a few whistles. Every once in a while, “Stairway to Heaven” comes up. But the idea was to be seminal and anthemic.
I was following the guy who invented [the term] “ERP” (enterprise resource planning)—which was pretty hard to beat if you ask me. So with that commentary, I wanted to do something that was as good. It was a bit of my swan song.
Q: What was the central focus of the presentation?
A: My issue was that as everybody went from looking at supply chains for saving money to looking at supply chains for making more money, standardization would become at war with diversification. And this war between standardizing and diversifying—between saving money and making more money—was going to create enormous tension in the business.
The key thing I was researching was, how could supply chain impact corporate competitiveness? That was the fundamental question we were trying to answer. And my view was the 3 V’s. You need to harness visibility, and then to differentiate [yourself], you have to embrace variability. You can’t eliminate it, you can’t run from it, you’ve just got to embrace it. Then competitive advantage would be rooted in velocity, the speed at which you could recombine your network. Because as you know, supply chains are networks, and they change all the time. It’s the speed of this recombination—this velocity—that would be the real differentiation—as long as you embrace variability. So I wrote the paper, and it had a larger-than-life history.
Q: If you had to give the presentation today, would you change anything?
A: Well, I did a 20-year update [to the framework], which now is eight years old. And what I’m hearing is that most people find it very relevant to today. Which is good because the idea is to be a bit ahead of the pack. [In the update,] we talk a lot about the new surveillance economy and how visibility has really graduated to surveillance.
The update talks about how we need to move from the internet of things to the internet and nouns and verbs. So people, places, and things all interconnecting and feeding real-time information engines that understand actions (or verbs) performed by subjects (or nouns) and the state or place to create end-to-end supply chain visibility. Right now, they’re calling that the “agentic internet.”
So that’s the evolution of the notion of visibility as it moves from, you know, tracking my truck to surveilling my suppliers and child-labor compliance and carbon usage. And by the way, we’re watching you all the time. So we’re controlling what you want to buy for sure, and you’re under constant surveillance, right?
The story I use to illustrate this is that I’m a Jewish guy, and I dated a Christian woman for eight years before we got married. While I was in the middle of dating, I started getting christianmingle.com advertisements. How did they know? They were watching. They knew. And it’s an ever-expanding gas, right? It’s just gets broader and broader and broader but more hyperspecialized.
Q: Can you explain what you mean by broader but more hyperspecialized?
A: The whole premise is based on Darwin’s law and hyperspecialization over time. If you study evolution, you know the theory of evolution is hyperspecialization and survival of the most adaptive types. As an example, we started off with computer dating, right? And it was very general, right? And then someone got into a bit of the Russian dating thing, and then we got into the farmers dating thing and the Christians dating thing. We have become more hyperspecialized. OK, now we enter real time. The world is now always on, always connected. And it went to Tinder. And then it got hyperspecialized and went to Grindr. So that’s the notion of generalized to hyperspecialized. So what I did was really try to understand how the evolution and proliferation of the microprocessor and the internet and constant Wi-Fi communication would change everything. And what I say is it’s going to evolve into hyperspecialized subcommunities of common interest over time.
I also just published a piece [on the GainSystems website] called “The Call for Awareness in the Age of AI,” which has gone about as cultlike as my 3 V’s. It has about 40,000 downloads. I basically say, “Can everyone shut up please about this AI stuff and just figure out what really matters and pay attention to the good, old-fashioned stuff?” Because I’ve seen this movie before. I was around in 2000 [during the dot-com era], when everyone lied to everyone the last time. It’s the great big lie déjà vu. The truth is, if you don’t know what you’re trying to transform, no technology, however advanced, can transform it for you. It’s a bit of a call to action to wake the hell up and stop chasing shiny objects and get back to the basics and stop buying everyone’s BS.
Q: Let’s talk a bit about the awards themselves. What are you hoping they will accomplish?
A: Oh, there are two things. One, as it relates to CSCMP and its conference, is that having everyone sit in their rooms with their arms folded listening to a presentation is a bit of a stale last-century model. We needed to make things more fun and more interesting. So I wanted to just help make the event better.
The second thing that was really much more important to me, personally, is that I’m tired of hearing everyone say, “Everybody sucks and fails all the time.” I think it’s important to celebrate success. I think CSCMP needs to do more of that.
Editor’s note: Judging for this year’s 3 V’s competition will be held during the CSCMP EDGE 2025 conference in National Harbor, Maryland. The live competition will feature three finalists presenting before a panel of distinguished judges in the Innovation Theater, sponsored by Knapp, on Monday, Oct. 6. The session will be hosted by Art Mesher himself alongside Rick Blasgen, former president and CEO of CSCMP. To register for the conference, which runs from Oct. 5 to 8, go to www.edgetechconference.com/page/4283440/register.
Primary Tag: 3 V’s framework
Tags: Art Mesher, visibility, variability, velocity, CSCMP, Gains Systems
Section(s): Featured, Plan (primary), Tech
