Interim Chief Supply Chain and Operations Officer — Delivery

Not a procurement reset, and not a site-by-site fix

A procurement project or a programme of site improvements is the obvious misreading of this appointment. It is neither. The interim chief of supply chain and operations answers to the Board Operations Committee and holds executive authority for 24 months to make suppliers and sites own their outcomes from end to end, so that a late delivery or a quality failure traces back to an owner who answers for it rather than dissolving somewhere between handoffs.

End-to-end accountability, built on purpose

The work begins with definitions. You will establish who decides what across suppliers and sites, which thresholds site and supplier managers keep, and the standard of proof required before investment, capacity and controls decisions are made. Then come the choices. Every inherited commitment will be continued, paused or ended on your call, and proposals that push cost or risk downstream without an accountable executive will stop with you. Investment will be refused where the case leaves out take-up, operating dependencies or the downside. You approve how the leadership is organised and how issues escalate, and you give the committee a steady rhythm of progress, exceptions and open decisions.

End-to-end accountability usually fails for a mundane reason: every party measures its own segment, and nobody measures the outcome the customer experiences. The remedy is rarely more metrics. It is fewer, shared ones, with a single executive behind each, and contracts and site objectives that point at the same result.

Decisions made where waiting cost money

You have made supply chain and operations decisions in agribusiness or food where waiting carried a measurable cost, in a business that turned over $625 million or more, employed 1,800 or more and operated in four countries. The committee will look for ESG transition, which in this sector reaches deep into supplier relationships, as well as professionalisation and succession. The capability profile is operating cadence at level 4, with operating model, network footprint, and quality and safety at level 3. Expect to discuss a reversible decision you took on incomplete operating evidence and later tightened, and a time you refused funding because take-up and downside were missing from the case, then rebuilt the capacity the business actually needed.

The term, then the route in

Within ninety days, decision rights across suppliers and sites should be settled, and each end-to-end outcome should have one accountable executive. Around month nine supplier and site performance should be reviewed on a set committee rhythm, with underspecified investment turned away as a matter of routine. By month 24 suppliers and sites should answer for end-to-end outcomes through a standing structure that outlasts the interim term.

Selection opens in week one with a confidential conversation over video with the Board Operations Committee, and the Board Chair works with you in a session of its own in the third week. The fifth week is given to an in-person panel of executive leaders, one from each function; the seventh week, to a closing discussion with the full board of directors. Each stage receives an answer in writing inside two working days.