Interim Chief Supply Chain and Operations Officer — Operating Controls

Two years spent deciding what to keep

The 24 months begin with an inventory. Within the first ninety days, every significant operating practice should be listed and given a verdict, scale it, fix it or retire it, and each verdict should carry the name of the person who will carry it out. That list matters more than any strategy document, because in supply chain and operations the practices people actually follow are the operating model, whatever the slides say.

Around month nine the inventory should have turned into action. Practices marked for retirement should be switched off, not left running in parallel as a comfort blanket. The practices chosen for scale should be standardised, and the supply chain controls that protect them should have been tested wherever they run. This is usually the hardest stretch, because retiring a practice means telling someone that the way they have always worked is ending.

By month 24 the scaled model and its controls should be embedded, with an operations bench able to run them without the interim officer. A good test is whether the next new market or product could be brought onto the model without anyone reinventing it.

Ruling on practices, commitments and proposals

The officer holds executive authority. Local leaders keep the operational limits the officer assigns them, and the officer also picks the measures by which investment, capacity and control are governed. Each inherited commitment is maintained, suspended or closed on the officer's ruling. An operations proposal that lands its cost or risk on someone who never accepted it is stopped, and investment is refused when the case has nothing to say about uptake, its dependencies, or what could go wrong. The officer also approves how operations leadership is organised and how problems travel upward, and settles disputes between the Country Managing Director and operating leaders while resources are still uncommitted.

An operator who has scaled across borders

Seven countries, 1,800 people and $700 million in revenue are the floor for the operations you have run. The experience that counts is a joint venture, succession and geographic expansion, each a moment when operating practice either travels well or breaks. The rhythm in which practices are reviewed and retired is the job, so operating cadence is sought at level 4. Operating model, network footprint and quality and safety, each at level 3, determine whether a practice is safe to scale.

In a joint venture you have moved authority, reset funding and changed the operating rhythm while the work carried on. You have kept service running while authority moved between people. Switching off a practice in your first months counts, for you, as real progress, and you can show the evidence behind that choice. In operations the data is never complete when the decision is due; you decide on what you have, tell the Country Managing Director what is missing, and correct course in the open.

Four meetings, beginning with the managing director

Week 1 is a confidential conversation over video with the Country Managing Director about the mandate and the way you would build the inventory. In week 3 the Risk Committee Chair works with you on which controls must travel with a practice when it scales. Week 5 is in person, with a panel of executives drawn from each of the company's functions. In week 7 you meet the full board. Our feedback, in writing, reaches you within four working days of each meeting.