Interim Regional Operations Director — Recovery (Logistics and Infrastructure)

Automation that waits for its process

Automation magnifies whatever process it is placed on. A stable, clearly owned process gets faster and cheaper; an unstable one fails faster and in more places at once. The Interim Regional Operations Director is appointed to hold that line across a region for 24 months, answering to the Regional President and carrying executive authority. The work is to sequence automation so that no step is approved until the process beneath it has an owner and a baseline that has held.

That requires real powers, and the seat has them. The director decides which regional decisions remain with local leaders and fixes the evidence on which decisions about money, capacity and process controls rest. They determine which automation and operations commitments made before their arrival carry on, wait or close. They halt any proposal that would push cost or risk onto others unless somebody answerable has accepted it, and they turn down investment that ignores whether anyone will adopt the result, what else it leans on, or how badly it could go wrong. They sign off the leadership team and the way issues climb, settle disagreements with operating leaders before money moves, and decide how often the board hears about automation progress, stalled processes and calls still pending. Across seven or more countries, much of the judgement lies in telling necessary local difference, the kind a regulator or a customer genuinely requires, from variation that survives mainly because it always has.

From owned processes to automation that holds

Inside ninety days, each in-scope process should have a single accountable lead and an agreed stable baseline, and no automation step should be signed off before that. By around month nine, the automation sequence should be agreed against evidence of process stability, and the automation commitments inherited from earlier plans should each have been kept, paused or closed on that basis. By month 24, automation should be running on processes that are owned and stable, and the region's local leaders should be handling the escalation of problems and the reporting of exceptions themselves.

A director who knows what to keep local

The operations you have led should span seven countries or more, bring in at least $505 million a year and employ 2,300 people or more. Your record includes succession, cost transformation and culture reset, and the panel will be listening for how you changed habits, not only structures. Operating cadence at level 4 matters most, with operating model, network footprint and quality and safety each at level 3. Your judgement should have been tested somewhere operations could not stop while authority was redrawn, and you should be able to set out an unresolved gap for a Regional President without letting doubt stall the decision. You know where local judgement should stay and where it should go, and you write that boundary down so others can apply it.

Stages that follow the same logic

The opening week brings a private conversation by video with the Regional President about how you would decide what is stable enough to automate. The third week belongs to the Risk Committee Chair and the operational risks of sequencing automation across many countries. Week five is a half-day in person with executives representing each function, and the full board meets you in the seventh week. Four working days is the longest you should wait for our reply, in writing, after each.