Interim Chief Supply Chain and Operations Officer — Value Agenda

Reliability first, volume second: what the seat holds

Supply chain leaders are usually rewarded for moving more. The person in this interim seat will be measured on something less glamorous and harder to fake: whether service holds steady before more volume is put through it. Reporting to the Regional President, this interim officer holds real executive authority, not a watching brief, for the full 24 months. They decide how operations decisions are divided between the centre and the people running each flow, which commitments inherited from earlier plans carry on and which are stopped or parked, and which evidence the business uses when it decides where money, volume and operating controls go. A proposal that would quietly push cost or risk onto another team goes no further than their desk, and neither does an investment case silent on which teams will run the new capability, which other work it leans on and the damage if it underdelivers. They decide how the leadership beneath them is organised and how problems climb, and they settle disputes between operating leaders and the Regional President before money or people move.

In practice, much of the judgement sits in one question asked many times over: is this flow reliable enough to take more? Answering it well needs operating cadence at level 4, meaning the ability to set a weekly and monthly rhythm in which reliability data, exceptions and open decisions surface early enough to act on. It needs operating model design at level 3; network footprint at level 3, so the officer can tell where volume can be absorbed and where it cannot; and quality and safety at level 3, because pressure on throughput is exactly where safety discipline is most often tested.

The operations you have led should have been at least $780 million in revenue, with 4,300 people or more, spread over two countries or more. Your record includes professionalisation, where informal practice gave way to standards people actually follow; integration, where two ways of running operations had to become one; and crisis response, where you kept service moving while the facts were still incomplete. You have refused funding when the adoption case and the downside were missing, and have then rebuilt the operations capacity that the refusal showed was needed. You expect to own the result for the full term, and you can tell a Regional President about an unresolved gap without treating uncertainty as a reason to wait.

Earning the right to add volume

Three things should be settled between the Regional President and the new officer over the first ninety days: a baseline for service reliability that operating teams accept as fair, who decides what across operations, and a single accountable lead for each supply chain flow. Around month nine, the commitments inherited from earlier plans should have been sorted, each one kept, held or closed, and any new volume should be entering only where the reliability evidence supports it. By month 24, service should be staying reliable as volume grows, and the operating rhythm and the handling of problems should belong to a standing leadership team rather than to the interim officer.

Meeting the people who will hold you to it

The Regional President speaks with you alone over video in week one, on how you would establish what reliable actually means flow by flow. Week three gives you time with the Board Chair, testing how you would bring trade-offs between reliability and volume to the board. In week five you sit in person with a panel of executives, one from each function that actually runs the work. A closing session with the whole board follows in the seventh week. Two working days is the longest you should wait to hear from us in writing after each stage.