Interim Chief Supply Chain and Operations Officer — Scale

When an outcome belongs to everyone

When a service outcome depends on a supplier, a site and a central function, each can point to the part it did well. End-to-end accountability means there is one answer to the question of who owns the result when the chain breaks. In this interim post you build that answer for every supplier and site, put it in writing, and then make it survive a bad night, which is the harder half of the work. Contracts and site procedures can say anything; what matters is who picks up the phone at two in the morning and whether they have the authority to act.

Authority to decide, answerable to a committee

The appointment carries executive authority, exercised under the oversight of the Board Operations Committee. You will fix the rules for supplier and site decisions, including the spending and service limits site managers may act within on their own. The measures used to judge spending, capacity and control will be yours to select. Inherited supplier contracts come to you for a verdict; so does any proposal that parks cost or risk where no one will answer for it, and any investment case that skips adoption, operating dependency or downside. You will also shape the team beneath you, decide the route a problem takes upward, broker disagreements between the committee and site and supplier managers, and fix how often the board sees progress, exceptions and unresolved questions.

Twenty-four months, in stages

In the first ninety days, you and the committee should agree how supplier and site decisions are taken, with an accountable owner for every end-to-end outcome. Everything later rests on that agreement, so it is worth getting right rather than getting fast. Around month nine, the supplier commitments you inherited should have been tested against evidence on capacity and control, and those that cannot be supported should be paused or brought to a close. By month 24, end-to-end accountability should be built into the leadership structure rather than held together by you, with the committee reviewing it on a rhythm it has set for itself.

Someone who has owned the chain, not a link in it

Operations or supply chain leadership across four countries is part of your record, in organisations of 1,400 people or more with revenue no lower than $700 million. You know what end-to-end accountability does to supplier negotiations and maintenance planning, because you have had to renegotiate both. You can separate an exception that is genuinely necessary from variation protected only by history. You are comfortable that your first visible win might be a supplier arrangement ended, not a programme started, and you can justify that to a committee with evidence.

The selection will look hard at professionalisation, succession and scale-up in your record, and at operating cadence at level 4 alongside operating model, network footprint and quality and safety, each at level 3. Succession carries particular weight over two years: the test of this appointment is whether the accountability you build is still working after you have gone. Candidates who need sign-off from each national head before halting a commitment, or who want influence without owning the result for the full 24 months, should not apply.

From the committee to the full board

Your first meeting is an introductory call by video, in confidence, with the Board Operations Committee in the opening week. By week three you will sit down with the Audit Committee Chair to work through how supplier and site accountability would be evidenced. Week five is a round-table of executives, in person,, each responsible for a different function; the seventh week ends with a closing session before the full board. Each stage gets a reply within three working days.