Interim Chief Supply Chain and Operations Officer — Renewal

Three trade-offs, one desk

Ask who owns the trade-off between quality, capacity and cost in a typical utility services operation and three people will raise their hands. Procurement buys to price, operations plans to capacity, and quality signs off afterwards, so the real trade-off is made by whoever happens to be holding the work when the three collide. This interim post exists to pull that trade-off onto one desk and to get it settled early, near the crews and depots, by people who can see its price.

The executive mandate over the trade-off

The authority is executive. You will decide how far a depot or regional manager can go on supply chain and operations matters before a call must come to you, and you will pick the measures by which spending, capacity and control are judged. You will rule on inherited commitments, keeping those that still earn their place and halting or deferring those that do not. Proposals that push cost or risk onto a team where nobody has agreed to answer for it will stop at your desk, and so will investment cases that are silent on the crews who must work with the change, the systems it leans on and the bill if it goes wrong. You will sign off the leadership structure and decide how problems travel upward, and you will settle conflicts with operating leaders while the money is still unspent.

Where the year should arrive

By day ninety, you and the Country Managing Director should have settled one method for weighing quality, capacity and cost against each other, and written down the limits front-line leaders hold and the person answerable for each exception. Around month nine, supply chain commitments with no owner for the cost or risk they create should have been stopped or given one, and the way problems are raised should be working in practice rather than on paper. By month 12, the three decisions should be taken together at the front line as a matter of habit, with the board reviewing exceptions on a cadence it has agreed.

A record of refusals as well as builds

Your supply chain and operations leadership has been exercised across three countries, in businesses with at least 1,200 people and revenue of $595 million or more. Your knowledge of utility services comes from calls that carried your own name, among them a commitment with no case behind it that you halted before the damage landed. You have turned down money for projects that could not say who would adopt them or what the downside was, then built back the operations capacity the work truly required. You have kept regulated assets running through a change of leadership when switching them off was never an option, and you can lay out the open questions to the Country Managing Director so that they lead to a decision rather than a deferral.

The experience under scrutiny

Cost transformation, platform pivot and professionalisation are the three experiences the selection will probe. Cost work in this seat is not cutting; it is knowing which spending buys quality and which merely buys comfort. A platform pivot tests whether you can change how work flows without losing control of it, and professionalisation tests whether the result survives your departure. On capability, operating cadence is sought at level 4, with operating model, network footprint and quality and safety each at level 3. Anyone who needs unanimous country-leader consent before halting a commitment, or who would leave local discretion untouched because challenging it is awkward, will find this authority uncomfortable. So will anyone who wants the influence without twelve months of accountability.

From the Country Managing Director to the board table

The first step, in the opening week, is an off-the-record call by video with the Country Managing Director. In the third week the Regional President spends time with you on how quality, capacity and cost trade-offs would be made in practice. In week five you sit with executives who each run one of the company's functions, and week seven brings the final conversation with the full board. You will have a response on each stage inside five working days.