Advisory Director — Network Performance

A standing adviser, not an auditor

The Advisory Director will not run the supply base, manage sites or inspect them. Decisions stay with the Group Chief Executive Officer and the executive team. Nor is the appointment a review that produces a report and departs. It is a standing advisory seat over 24 months, intended to help the organisation answer one difficult question: when an end-to-end outcome falls short, who is accountable for it? In most consumer and distribution businesses the honest answer is everyone and nobody. Suppliers meet their contract terms, sites hit their local measures, and the customer still receives the wrong product late. The adviser's job is to help design accountability that follows the outcome rather than the organisation chart.

Where the advice will be needed most

The adviser will help agree how decisions about supplier and site accountability are made, including the thresholds that remain local, and give a view on which measures should decide spending, capacity and control. They will recommend which inherited commitments should carry on and which should be paused or ended, challenge proposals that would move cost or risk onto a supplier, site or team without anyone accountable for it, and question investment cases that assume take-up, leave dependencies unexamined or omit the downside. They will also offer counsel on how the leadership is organised and how issues are surfaced to the executive, and help the Group Chief Executive Officer and operating leaders work through disagreements before budgets are locked in. Accountability is rarely redesigned while trade stands still, so much of this advice will need to be given in the flow of day-to-day operations.

Accountability tested in a crisis

The organisations you have advised or led carried revenue of $460 million or more and 1,300 people across six countries. We will look at what you learned in crisis response, in buy-side M&A and in professionalisation. Crisis response is telling: in a crisis, end-to-end accountability is tested in hours, and you will have seen where it held and where it dissolved. Acquisitions add the experience of joining supplier bases and sites that were never designed to work together. Operating cadence is expected at level 4, with operating model, network footprint, and quality and safety at level 3 each. You have made operations choices where hesitation had a price, and you build up others along the way so that accountability keeps working after the advisory seat ends.

Mapped, reviewed, routine

Within ninety days, supplier and site accountabilities for end-to-end outcomes should be mapped and settled with the Group Chief Executive Officer. By around month nine, supplier and site performance should be reviewed against those outcomes, and the adviser's recommendations on which commitments carry on and which do not should have been given and considered. By month 24 supplier and site accountability should be part of routine operating reviews and board reporting, sustained without advisory support.

Selection opens in week one with the Group Chief Executive Officer, by confidential video. Week three takes you to the Regional President to explore how accountability would work across markets. In week five, executives leading the separate functions see you in person, and in week seven you meet the full board. Our assessment of each stage reaches you in writing within five working days.