Est. 2006

Chief Operating Officer · Singapore / Southeast Asia · Global perspective

September 2026 edition

Leon Halim

Turning enterprise ambition into dependable execution.

Leading article

Turning enterprise ambition into dependable execution.

I help organisations deliver on the promises they make to customers. My work connects operating design, frontline capability and performance discipline so that growth can be supported by a dependable business.

I begin with the work itself: how a request becomes an outcome, where decisions stall and which constraints teams must navigate. An operating model is useful when people understand ownership, can surface problems early and have the means to resolve them.

I value close contact with customers and operating teams. Their experience is often the earliest signal that an apparently strong performance measure is concealing a fragile process.

Continued on the profile page →

From the desk of Leon

Operations should make dependable delivery repeatable. I make ownership and constraints visible, listen to frontline evidence and improve the whole workflow rather than optimise one function at another's expense.

— Leon Halim

In this edition

Dispatches from practice

Case 01

Operating model redesign

An organisation had grown through local improvisation, leaving hand-offs between commercial and delivery teams unclear. I mapped the end-to-end workflow with team leaders, assigned ownership at the points where work crossed functions and established a shared escalation routine. The redesign made service commitments and capacity decisions part of the same conversation.

Case 02

Delivery reliability

Delivery teams were responding to recurring exceptions as if each were new. We separated demand variation from avoidable process failure, reviewed the causes with frontline colleagues and gave recurring issues a named owner. The operating review shifted from reporting yesterday's misses to removing the conditions that produced them.

Case 03

Productivity and quality

A productivity programme risked moving costs from one function to another without improving the customer outcome. I introduced end-to-end measures alongside local targets and tested changes in a contained operating unit before wider adoption. Quality, workload and service reliability remained visible throughout the decision.

The full record of leadership work →

Appointments

Harrow & Vale IndustriesIndependent Director · 2023 — Present

The Manufacturing Skills CouncilAdvisory Board Member · 2020 — Present

Honours

Operations Leader of the YearThe Operations Excellence Awards · 2024

Supply Chain Resilience AwardCapital & Governance Quarterly · 2022

As reported in

The Operations Excellence Journal“From 81% to 97% on-time without a single new plant” · 2025

The Boardroom Review“What boards should see in an operations review” · 2024

The Leadership Ledger podcast“Episode 109 — Keeping the promise to customers” · 2023

The record

Chief Operating OfficerAldermoor Group · 2020 — Present

Vice President, OperationsFairhaven Holdings · 2016 — 2020

Vice President, Supply ChainHarrow & Vale Industries · 2012 — 2017

Plant DirectorCalder Logistics · 2006 — 2012

Letters to the editor

“Turns ambition into an operating system people can actually run.”
Lars Eriksen, Chief Executive, Harrow & Vale Industries
“Safety, service and cost improved together. I had not seen that before.”
Nandini Rao, Chair, Operations & Safety Committee

An invitation

Correspondence welcome.

Leon welcomes conversations with boards, chairs, search advisers and editors.

Open to
  • Board appointments
  • Advisory roles
  • Speaking invitations

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