It’s a sunny, warm Thursday late in the afternoon. Spring in California is like summer elsewhere: high temperatures in the 70s and lows in the 50s. Longer days of sunlight are a pleasant change from the dull grey of winter. Most Los Angeles residents take the opportunity to enjoy iced drinks, play backyard sports, and host a barbecue or three before the summer turns scorching.
Anthony Samaniego, 35, might like to join them. Instead, after a long day at work, he closes his company-issued laptop and opens another. He has homework to do. After two years of supply chain school–and ten partnering with procurement and supply chain practitioners as a key member of ProcurementIQ’s team–he’s just a few months away from completing his master’s degree at Michigan State University’s prestigious Eli Broad College of Business.
The Master's in Supply Chain Management program takes an average of two years to complete. That’s the timeline Samaniego signed up for. Most people will see his degree and understand the two years of commitment and hard work he dedicated toward that venture. But the hard work began long before enrolling in Michigan State, and his voyage from sales to supply chain was more than ten years in the making.
Evolving With the Times
A self-described “data junkie,” Samaniego joined ProcurementIQ, the market intelligence arm of IBISWorld, back in 2015, near the company’s beginning. While ten years may not seem very long next to the hundred-year history of supply chain management, the amount of change the world—and by extension, procurement and supply chain—has experienced during the last decade is nearly unprecedented.
“It’s a constant evolution."
When asked if he’s seen it all, he’s emphatic. “No. I think if we look at the tariff situation and the challenges it’s posing for supply chains, we’re in unprecedented territory. So saying I’ve seen it all when I’m currently living something I’ve never seen before would be lying to myself.”
There are plenty of reasons college graduates might gravitate toward supply chain, in part due to that constant evolution: job security, salary, room for growth. Per the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the job market for logisticians is projected to grow 19% between 2023 - 2033. With geopolitical conflicts, pandemics, tariffs, labor disputes, and other supply chain-affecting crises demanding every ounce of effort practitioners can muster, the job function will only grow in importance.
That said, being responsible for mitigating risks that can be difficult, or impossible to foresee, is a huge stressor not everybody can shoulder.
But for Samaniego, juggling external factors while planning for the future was what drew him to the job function in the first place. “I had tunnel vision before the supply chain program,” he says. “I didn’t have a good enough understanding of those external components, the ripple effects that change how procurement or an organization has to source something as a whole.”
“Local-level events have ripple effects that reverberate across supply chains and organizations, so that’s ultimately what gets me excited about the space. You can’t really foresee what’s going to happen tomorrow.”
After a decade working for ProcurementIQ, Samaniego has experienced worldwide supply chain crises firsthand. “There’s a constant push and pull,” he says on accounting for disruptions. “For me, that’s where data, market intelligence, even AI all play a role in helping arm supply chain professionals with the right information, and timely information, to pivot as quickly as they can. It’s going to put you in a better position to make decisions.”
"The more informed you are, it ultimately helps eliminate blind spots and pitfalls you might not think about.”
Blind spots and pitfalls are common in every job function, just as they’re common in life. Though his experiences alongside procurement and supply chain practitioners eventually led him to adopt their credos and follow in their footsteps, that wasn’t always the case.
From Student to Educator
“That’s been my biggest shift during my time [at ProcurementIQ],” Samaniego says of his experience. “I was so focused on selling at the start that I didn’t do a good job of pivoting. You know, how I was positioning our products. But supply chain school helped me stop thinking about it like a salesperson."
“Now I really just view myself as an educator."
The challenge is what makes supply chain so rewarding for Samaniego: "The beauty of this space is I can talk to five businesses in the same industry and talk to the same function, but they’re facing vastly different challenges.”
For the past two years, Samaniego’s goal has been simple, if challenging: raise his daughter, work with procurement departments daily, and graduate with his master’s degree. It hasn’t been easy. It’s required long hours of study after a demanding full-time job and working together with his wife to raise a family. Despite that, he’s all grins when asked how he manages to juggle a busy schedule. The answer is simple: he approached supply chain school like a practitioner might. “My wife and I set a plan for healthy boundaries and time management before I started the program. It’s never gotten to the point where I felt like it was detracting from my family time or my relationship with them.” Though, he admits, it was a demanding two years.
With graduation on the horizon and a new role with ProcurementIQ as a client relationship manager ahead, Samaniego looks to an ever-changing future with both his newfound supply chain expertise and his place of business.
As ProcurementIQ plans to implement sweeping new product updates this fall to better enable practitioners to see their sourcing landscape from a top-down perspective, Samaniego is preparing to guide clients through the next era of strategic sourcing.
“You can’t do any of the things supply chain will be at the forefront of," he says, "without having the right team to bring resources and solutions forward to make them a reality."
"There’s so much unknown ahead and supply chain is what brings all groups together.”
In May, Samaniego will walk with the other graduates from his class and receive his Master’s in Supply Chain Management. It’ll represent the end of one life chapter in more ways than one. After ten successful years as a salesperson at ProcurementIQ, Samaniego will take advantage of the company’s investment in employees to transfer to its client services department, where he’ll apply his education directly with supply chain and procurement practitioners.
From soliciting client feedback for future product rollouts to ensuring clients receive the maximum ROI possible from their ProcurementIQ membership, Samaniego’s expertise will lend a new dynamic to an already veteran team of client relationship managers that were on the forefront of ProcurementIQ’s upcoming product updates.
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